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[FlyingSquirrel]

Author’s Note: This fanfic is presented as a series of “excerpts” from a classified report, written by members of a new species during the next cycle in a scenario where Shepard chose the “Refuse” option at the end of Mass Effect 3. I’ve written a bit more than what I’ve posted here and would love to hear some feedback as to whether people are interested and if I should keep going. (I’m also contemplating a companion piece that would delve into what exactly happened after Shepard refused to activate the Crucible.)

 

Excerpts from…

PROJECT ENIGMA:
A Review of Pre-Dash’Tel Galactic History
and the Implications of the Proteus Collection
By Dr. Crona Laran and Dr. Spev Kasilia

 

NOTE: All material contained in this report is classified by order of the Dash’Tel Defense Agency. Unauthorized possession, duplication, or distribution of any portion of this report will be prosecuted under Code 782, Subsection 2a of the Dash’Tel Criminal Code.

 

Introduction

 

This report represents the culmination of the work of PROJECT ENIGMA over the past two years. Its primary authors, historian Dr. Crona Laran and physicist Dr. Spev Kasilia, were first recruited by the intelligence division of the Dash’Tel Defense Agency (DDA) five years ago upon the discovery of what is now known as the Proteus Signal, for the purpose of conducting a classified review of the signal’s contents and its potential security implications. The detection of an additional 18 signals over the next three years indicated a clear need to expand the inquiry to include additional expert opinion and analysis, hence the creation of PROJECT ENIGMA and the recruitment of 86 additional personnel to aid in the classified review.

 

For the roughly 200 years between the Dash’Tel Space Commission’s first long-term exploratory missions and the discovery of the Proteus Signal, the academic consensus regarding galactic history underwent few major changes, with only small additions to our collective knowledge along the way. We knew that other species had found and used the mass relays before we did, that periods of expansion and colonization had evidently taken place, and that the Citadel in System 291K (hereafter referred to as the “Sol” System, in keeping with Proteus Collection nomenclature) had likely served as a sort of hub of galactic governance and interspecies exchange. (Among other indicators, DNA traces associated with at least ten different spacefaring species had been recovered in the Sol System.) The Citadel was thought to have been constructed by humans, given that it is located in the same system as their homeworld Earth, and they, along with the species identified as asari, salarians, and turians, were likely the most influential.

 

However, most of this had been pieced together only through the very scant archaeological remains discovered on other worlds and from transmissions detected through the Savlon Method, most of them thousands of years old and of seemingly minor significance. Even Earth itself yielded only a few significant finds, leading some to theorize that humans had abandoned their planet for the Citadel or for new colonies and taken most of their technology with them.  About all that could be said definitively was that a multispecies society, which came to be known as Civilization A or “Civ-A” for short, had once existed but appeared to have collapsed, with the species that had traveled the stars having either (1) gone entirely extinct or (2) retreated to isolated areas where we could not detect them and remained there ever since. None of the messages broadcast by the Space Commission, including those that were translated into Civ-A languages using the available fragments, received any detectable response.

 

Needless to say, the Proteus Collection (the term that we have come to use for the original signal plus those subsequently found, now totaling 28) has forced us to undertake a thorough re-examination of our assumptions. Equally intriguing as the information contained in the Collection is the nature and structure of the Collection itself. Whatever its purpose, it has become clear that the Collection is *not* simply a series of unrelated broadcasts or archives; rather, it was deliberately designed as a puzzle, one which we have yet to solve in its entirety, by an individual who was likely an asari intelligence operative of some sort. Not only have several of the signals included clues as to additional transmitter locations, but at least one obscure and heavily encrypted message recurs in all 28 to date, with all transmitters set to remain dormant until certain phenomena associated with interstellar travel and communication are detected. Our mysterious asari chronicler may not have preserved this information in the clearest and most easily intelligible manner, but she evidently did want us – or some civilization like ours – to find it.

 

Given the fragmentary nature of the Collection, our work has required a great deal of speculation. In the interests of providing the Dash'Tel Defense Agency with the fullest perspective possible, we present both the issues on which we were able to reach a broad consensus as well as those that yielded numerous competing theories. Unless otherwise noted, the names of stars, planets, and other locations follow the star charts and related information discovered in the Collection.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Section 1. The Nature of the Proteus Collection

 

Discovery

 

The original Proteus Signal was discovered by the crew of the Klenwas, a Type C Exploratory vessel, when surveying the Athens system. It did not mark the first time that a Space Commission crew discovered a Civilization A transmitter still in operation; on three previous occasions, generic distress calls that were set to loop indefinitely and were powered by an on-site solar array were detected. However, the location of the transmitter (well below the surface of the mostly oceanic planet, and far from any remains of any active colony), as well as the fact that it was clearly designed for undersea use (i.e., it was not a crashed space module but had been placed there deliberately), marked it as an unusual find. Why, as Captain Donica Me’est pondered in her mission log, would anyone transmit from a location where any Civ-A contemporaries would be unlikely to pick up the signal?

 

The Klenwas science team quickly determined that the signal was not likely intended for Civ-A contemporaries at large, nor had it even been transmitting for very long. Rather, it was purposely constructed to monitor for scans originating from orbit (such as that used by the Klenwas) and to begin transmitting only when such a scan was detected. Nor was this the only peculiar feature of the transmission. The science team also discovered that, while its contents were configured so as to be translatable into multiple Civ-A languages, it was originally composed in the asari language, even though the only settlements in the entire system were a few small human colonies on the surface of Proteus. Finally, several cryptograms were discovered within the transmission – one that could not be deciphered at the time, and the others highlighting locations on what turned out to be the planets known as Armeni and Edolus.

 

After obtaining permission from the DDA, the Klenwas crew traveled to these planets and found a similar transmitter on each. Once again, both transmitters were constructed to activate only in response to being scanned, both were originally composed in the asari language, and both contained cryptograms, including directions to additional locations within the mass relay network. Subsequent exploratory missions have now retrieved 28 such transmitters in total, with their contents now known as the Proteus Collection among DDA personnel and ENIGMA staff.

 

Contents

 

The Collection is not presented as the work of a single author. Rather, whoever assembled it seems to have collected both primary sources (such as speeches, memos, and news reports) as well as secondary sources (such as Civ-A scientific and historical works). All of these archives consist of brief excerpts from these sources, rarely more than 4-5 sentences long. In four cases, a fragment from one transmission has been paired with a fragment from another to form a longer excerpt. For example, the following excerpt from a human military document consists of two such fragments:

 

…on Mindoir illustrates several ways in which colonial defense preparations have proven inadequate. First, while the colony’s mass relay traffic monitor did detect the arrival of the batarian frigates, the monitor was immediately targeted with a cyberattack that disguised the ships’ transponder readings as those of a salarian cargo convoy. Due to delays in intelligence-sharing between the Colonial Defense Agency and the Interstellar Intelligence… [Signal 3 (Edolus), Fragment 84]

 

…Unit, the most up-to-date anti-hacking subroutines had not been installed, and no one realized that the frigates had been incorrectly identified until civilian air traffic authorities made visual contact. Second, the civilian colonial law code and the Alliance Colonial Defense Procedures contained separate, and at times incompatible, protocols for declaring a colony-wide emergency and initiating evacuation… [Signal 2 (Armeni), Fragment 47]

 

This would, of course, be a bizarre way to organize a conventional historical archive, even if one were to put aside the unusual circumstances in which these fragments were found. Still, simple math indicates that whoever assembled this collection has evidently done so in such a way as to allow the pieces to be assembled. A total of 1,823 fragments have been recovered to date, out of what were likely billions of memos, speeches, historical works, and other documents that the Civ-A species must have produced over the centuries. The probability of these fragments sharing even one original source – much less the four identified so far – as a matter of pure chance would be astronomically low.

 

Most of the information contained in the Collection deals with the political, social, and military histories of the Civ-A species. Some of the fragments have enabled historians assigned to ENIGMA to verify and expand upon established understanding of the Civ-A era. For example, it has long been hypothesized that the krogan joined the galactic community during a period in which most of the Civ-A species were engaged in a violent conflict of some sort. The recovered fragments have revealed that this conflict originated with an unprovoked and brutal attack launched by a species known as the rachni, and that the krogan were in fact recruited by other Civ-A species who viewed their military prowess as key to turning the tide against the rachni attackers (which, it appears, is exactly what happened).

 

Other fragments, however, have proven past assumptions to be wrong. In particular, the hypothesized history of the Sol System appears to have been incorrect in significant ways. Humans, we now know, were not even aware of the existence of other intelligent species until very late in the Civ-A era and were relative newcomers to what we have taken to calling the “Citadel Regime” – this despite the location of the Citadel in orbit around their homeworld and the sophisticated understanding of astronomy documented in several fragments of human historical records. In other words, it is highly likely that human astronomers would have observed the Citadel’s presence and the interstellar traffic associated with it long before the actual date on which humanity began to use the mass relays and make contact with other species. At the same time, four ENIGMA team members who have taken part in scientific studies of the Citadel’s technology all concurred that the station possesses no “cloaking” technology nor any means of long-range self-propulsion.

 

Nor is this the only major unexplained event in the history of the Sol System. While significant details are missing (perhaps to be revealed via signals and archives not yet discovered), a series of fragments from military memos indicate that (1) nearly every spacefaring species launched major military deployments to the Sol System near the end of the Civ-A era; and (2) whatever occurred there, all species suffered devastating loss of life, perhaps even on a scale that might explain the ultimate collapse and disappearance of Civ-A. It is unclear whether the Civ-A species were co-belligerents against some unidentified enemy or were fighting each other for some reason. In any case, the scale of the event – which we refer to as the “Sol Confrontation” throughout this report – certainly points to a sudden and catastrophic development in Civ-A history.

 

The bulk of this report will address the new historical facts brought to light by the Collection, followed by a discussion of the security implications thereof and the major arguments both for and against declassifying this material.

[Seracen]

Oh my god!  Recent activity in the forum  !  It's nice to no longer be monopolizing the top posts here  !

 

Anyhoo, knowing how frustrating it can be to get NO feedback, I figured I'd do my part.  Codex style entries aren't really my thing, but the piece is well written and interesting from a historical perspective.  I might add a few more "incident reports" and anecdotes to liven things up (similar to the bits you had in italics, but perhaps with 1st person commentary), unless you intend to pair these chapters with a narrative at some point.  Otherwise, like I said, not my preference, but well done nonetheless!

 

Incidentally, if you have any free time, I posted my own stuff in the forum (samples really, the main stuff is in my sig).  Good luck with the rest of your project!

[FlyingSquirrel]

Thanks! I get that it won't be everyone's cup of tea, though I expect that it will pick up a little in the excerpts on Shepard, some of the other big events/personalities of the trilogy, and human history (which, as you can probably gather, the Dash'Tel have gotten wrong in significant ways). These first two parts are mainly meant to establish the concept of the piece and some brief background on what the Dash'Tel did and didn't know before finding the signals. 

 

The companion piece might be a little more of a traditional narrative. The concept I have in my head is a Dash'Tel historian several decades into the future writing a "you-are-there" recreation of the Normandy crew's last days using new information that they've discovered in the meantime. I thought about alternating between just a regular narrative of those events in one chapter and excerpts from the Dash'Tel report in the next chapter, but I don't feel like there's any aesthetic reason to do that and that it would just be a gimmick.

 

One small preview, and the basis for the companion piece if I get around to it - the encrypted message in all the signals is: "Find EDI."

 

BTW, I took a look at your Requiem fic and thought it was pretty well put-together based on the "path" that I followed. I have some general objections to the Indoctrination Theory / Destroy-but-without-the-bad-side-effects alternatives, but that's more of a philosophical thing. I'll go back later and try some of the other paths to see how it turns out.

[Seracen]

Nifty!  As I always say, just do what comes naturally to you.  If you have a good story, and a passion to write it, it'll come across.  I wasn't the biggest fan of Tolkein's Silmarilion, b/c it was presented in a historical text manner, but muscling through to the meatier parts of the story was still worth it.  As I said, the codex style you presented was interesting enough.  I imagine it'll really pop when you institute those other ideas you were speaking of.

 

Thanks for giving Requiem a shot!  Yeah, I don't like mixing the traditional endings either, but I used the explanation as a short hand for those who need such summaries.  I think I managed to find an artful alternative to the Crucible solution, but I understand everyone has their own preferences.  Personally, I am accepting of a variety of potential outcomes, even the ever popular "multiverse" theory.

 

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the subsequent reads, and again best of luck on your own work!