Time frame: late ME2
Location Citadel embassies
Presentation :CGI board room discussion
XXX: Admiral Anderson, I understand you wanted another report on the Ilos material; medically there seem to be no superior medical advances to be gained, maybe in stimulants and the like, but nothing major to extend life medically.
Anderson: speculate then a stasis field? and what about the frost?
XXX: Stasis, yes of a sort, this has driven us harder to decode a material layer and we are confident that dark matter is involved and that the anchor materials are near the dark matter fallout region of our accelerators. An odd thing though, these exotic materials have a short half life, that we would have normally discarded. Somehow the anchoring effect stabilizes them, none of us saw that coming and it is a significant find. We are tooling up to test this theory by depositing the anchor material and immediately following with a dark matter run and then we will do the mass spec again to confirm anchoring. We should be able make a successful run some time next month.
As for the frost, there is an HVAC plant designed to protect the occupant from extremes, just as we have and there a few new bells and whistles, but nothing to explain the frost. We speculate that the chamber frost is a transition state from stasis or isolated flow of time if you choose and frost collection may be proportional somewhat, to length in stasis.
Anderson: And the collector pods Shepard analyzed?
XXX: Garbage in comparison to the Prothean ones! The Protheans must have gone to great lengths to protect the technology or as ARC put it "Reapers are too stupid to look in the right place" Arc has a unique systems engineering point of view and considering what it does controlling millions of automations and every aspect to ring design to participating in theoretical science, that seems appropriate. But ARC is right, we have not seen any evidence of practical high energy accelerator applications. Yes the reapers have a wide array of accelerator based weapons, but nothing even approaching our Ring technology or evidently the Protheans.
Anderson: so your little science project settled on ARC and what about more?
XXX; For arc length and arc of the covenant among other things, but "little science project" is the wrong word. Arc initially encompassed 1/4 of a 47 kilometer ring with computer hardware nearly a kilometer deep and kilometer across. I think humanity holds the record for scale in computational dynamics among other things. Since no other intelligence developed beyond the basic VI, ARC will eventually encompass the entire ring if it so chooses, but I think it wants to preserve the minds of some its old human friends. Sort of like the ancestors of the Quarian if I understand that correctly. The trick is, can preserve all that they were and they remain stable. There is no going back, while we can displace a consciousness for a time it breaks down and the patterns and activity are destructively removed from their brain, so any mistakes and they are gone.
Anderson: So they are that rare, can we improve on that?
XXX: Oddly enough ARC believes this ancestor thing is one way, funnier still perhaps is that ARC has asked me to mother an AI.
Anderson: What?
XXX: yeap I'm going to be a mother. There are medical advances that Catherine is eager to study. One minute she ambushes me for VR sex, the next I'm her lab rat. Catherine is our chief surgeon and in an asteroid collision emergency, she bonded with me to do trauma surgery on the children if needed, as the automated medical bay was down. We shared minds that day and have grown very close as a result.
Anderson: Bonding? Can you share the details?
XXX: It was a very stressful time and one where ARC needed me or us for a change. However, having Catherine on board in my expanded network, I moved so fast and controlled so many automations that the repairs were back to normal in hours. Then there was a methane explosion that threw me to the floor gasping for air. Arc managed to get an emergency automation to me for oxygen and meds and Catherine guided me to inject atropine, steroids and stims. So, I/we rushed to put out the fires from methane the asteroid carried, but the fires came too close to ARC's hardware for my liking. Catherine helped me do diagnosis on ARC's systems and fortunately it was just an automation control node and a power conduit, important but not critical.
Anderson: that must have been traumatic and what about the children?
XXX; Fortunately, the children were in the orphanage with minor injuries for the most part and we stabilized them and locked it down quickly, but it was a hard lesson. If we had had to make a choice between ARC and the children- It could've been much worse. Now the orphanage goes into lockdown automatically in an emergency and has a redundant medical unit. We have redistributed power and some of ARC's cognitive systems are now redundant on a larger scale. Additionally, we reinforced the exterior with additional diamond sapphire and improved telemetry to detect high velocity methane ice asteroids and an automated defence system.
I thought you knew that Pod life is addictive Anderson, I am the only adult that comes and goes freely as yet, clearly that needs to change and Catherine and the medical staff are going to start rotations soon. However, ring children have blended genes and are brought up in an orphanage of sorts, they have automations and pods to link to teachers and the like and anyone that feels parental until they are about 12 or so and can have their own pod. So no, you are not the only reason I'm a free body, I am a father figure to them all until we can get others out of their pods to help out.
Anderson: Automated defence system?
XXX: It's an extension of the automation build and repair in combination with turrets and weaponized automations along with our synthetic black hole ports tied to the accelerators. If the weaponized automations miss anything, the rail guns and wide spectrum lasers will and before you ask: Deep IR to UV pulsing at several kilowatt bursts and the rail gun ports can send various loads at 0.3 to 0.7 c I will send the specifications.
Anderson: any lingering effects? Can't have one of my best assets off his game.
XXX: Neither of us has been the same, we share echos of each other for lack of a better term and by itself that is not bad we have always been friends, but it's unnervingly hard to be away. ARC "felt this" somehow over our link so designed an interface through itself to all Ring services and pods, it's a bit overwhelming, but the feeling of being disconnected is gone. Collectively, the experience shocked or culture and showed some interesting neurokinetics. I think extra processing power and memory will be on everyone's wish list.
Back to the technology: self healing fiber optic filaments will be shot through my eyes and down the optic nerves to nested processors, they are doped to interface with the visual nervous system and enable machine vision, that's probably the worst of it, I'll be blind for a week or so. Most of the other senses are located by PET and assessed accordingly and a my muscle augmentation implants that allow me to leave the pod freely are improved with the addition a rather small power source, location yet TBD, and then some specialized code ARC and the science department are cooking. Theory is, it will mirror my systems in a symbiotic way for it to develop faster and I will train it until it can leave and join with ARC.
I believe there is a larger reason, learning from a host develops memory of a parent and friend and merging with ARC a new friend and parent - symbiosis on a grand scale. I would have not expected ARC to approach the subject of reproduction or any of the philosophical debates of late, but ARC is growing and there are some deep discussions. The Quarian/Geth war bothers ARC, we are family and ARC asks why could they not achieve this state of symbiosis? I remind ARC about the Cerberus division, the xenophobic illusive man took about half over AI development and we became a covert research station. Additionally, there are people on Earth that would put me on a cross and set me afire. I also get the sense ARC's lonely, maybe those studies on low reproducibility get to ARC much like us through some equivalent of the subconscious -but here you might want to talk to someone in the field of machine and human intelligence, I'm just guessing
Anderson: I hear you and no visits to Earth without a Alliance guard from now on. Thank you, that was one hell of a report.
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