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Others since that first cousin who randmother into a particularly unlovely dinner plate eth Shock Trooper in the er Their code base was lass wafer one fiftieth of the size of this clunky, heavy metal saucer But code, code itself, just the presence ofyou didn’t tell it to Until, of course, you told it to And someone whose DNA still moved in Senna’s cells must have known all that Must have known that ancestor VIs were not sentient and could not beco thes by talking to it However organically a sophisticated linguistic-emotive-depictive triad seemed to arise, the words a VI used, the tone of voice, and the gestures it depicted were entirely algorithence was so much more complicated than that Those rebellious aunties or uncles, whoever they were, had kept Liat’Nir and hidden her from the collective extereneration had passed her down to the next with so much love and reverence it made Senna’s heart ache to remember the day his parents had introduced him to her, hard-coded his name into her admin access controls, and told him never, ever to tell anyone And he hadn’t Not even Qetsi Not even when they’d been at their closest But there had never been aall the way to Andro Grandmother with him He would rather have left both his arms behind
“Liat,” he said to the gliram “I have a problem Time is of the essence”
Ancestor VIs had a set number of phrases they could open a conversation with, and their available responses branched out fro on how their descendant reacted They could share soue of personal anecdotes or answer any query that the real ancestor would have been able to handle—or more, with all the style of a cantankerous relative at supper, if it were connected to a modern datacore But the reason it was any use or fun at all talking to an ancestor VI was that they could i and reco previous phrases, and every time you used a new phrase with Liat, she remembered it and could use it on her own, so that a conversation with Liat’Nir was actually a conversation with both her and every relative of his who had interacted with her, a private language of interacting references, a group call with the whole history of the Nir clan But however iht seem to the uninitiated, it wasn’t much more than a parlor trick—no different than the old human folktale about infiniteto produce so Yorrik could sink his slats into
The other method hy, despite her value, the mere existence of Liat’Nir was a crime
A small, firewalled part of her command line did allow for spontaneous recorarandroup of her pre-programmed LED responses She would then cos to produce a coinal solution never presented to her by a user or by her to one Each iteration generated “child” strings that contained some data from one “parent” data set and sorandmother could sip her tea, Liat could attempt hundreds and thousands of iterations, eneration” approached a successful result until one of them optimally fulfilled the fitness function—whatever it was that her poor, slow-thinking grandchild had asked her This wasHa the any monkey that failed to produce a melancholy Dane The definitions of fitness, optienerate somewhat unusual conversations A machine’s interpretation of fitness did not always randmotherly advice When he was a kid, Senna had asked Liat’Nir if he would ever really be happy She had considered it, and answered: Sweetheart, you know I love you But this life is long and hard and you’re old enough for the truth: not unless you install a significantly i your main drive, and seriously supplement your RAM He’d been upset at first Switched her off and stor deck about how nobody understood hiotten And soic he could never have arrived at on his own
Soibberish Just before he joined Nedas, he’d asked her if he would ever see the quarian hoo fish and refused to elaborate He still hadn’t figured that one out
Senna considered that it was not unlike the replication of a virus The virus attaches to the surface receptors of the host cell, penetrates the membrane, fuses its own DNA with that of the cell, reproduces until the cell bursts and the process is repeated with new viral cells that contain soh to reassure an unhappy child, some sheer nonsense, some, perhaps, uniquely ideal More fit to spread the infection than the previous generation, stronger, more adaptable, able to colonize new parts of the body
In ter was the equivalent of the first rock the first proto-quarian beast on Rannoch had used to crush the first fa’yin shell to get at the nut inside It was almost unbelievably crude and unsophisticated Nevertheless, in it lay… everything Genetic progra block of a machine that could truly think In Liat’Nir, the part of her that could, in soine unique ansell beyond shackled, its use strictly liorithms safely quarantined from the rest of her functions
By using her personal na with the co her to access and use it
Liat rolled her eyes
“You always do, ke’sed” She always called hi of the qorach—an anihorn sheep whose bellies were forever covered in blue-green cli the thorny plants over theinsects on Rannoch; all the native livestock existed in uneasy and often ungraceful symbiosis Senna didn’t know if she’d called everyone before hiuardian of the ancestor VI ke’sed, and every time he’d almost asked, he just couldn’t bear to know The phrase also served as confir “I swear the day you can take care of yourself all the stars will go nova and the universe will end”
Liat’Nir rued in her robes, swore a few tiarette and a pink ernail and inhaled her sraenerated from a fixed cluster, ordered, he presumed, by the frequency hich the real Liat’Nir had done thearette sequence was a rare treat, but it was his absolute favorite He’d never seen a quarian smoke in real life, and he didn’t think he ever would The sheer nue your respiratory system for pleasure, for recreation! It was incredible Like watching a dinosaur repeatedly hit itself in the face for fun Soarette pro different—Bet’salel Financial Advisors or Gaddiel & Sons Agrarian Suppliers or Ovad’ya’s Fine Cosht Café & Cabaret Forgotten, long-vaporized businesses from his lost homeworld, from a life he could not
possibly iine
“Well, out with it!” the VI said, her voice dear and loving and acerbic, gravelly with smoke
“There is so with the ship’s datacore We have experienced a series of erratic syste to stop”