Some kinda data decryption! Or data archaeology, or something.

They've been trying to disassemble a large body of data-or-is-it-code. It's organized oddly, not quite like anything you usually find on the net, but what's been decoded of the structure suggests it might be the parameters for enough of a VI to make a decent low-budget interactive fiction. Or maybe it's just one of those futile “you can look at this but only the way we want you to” schemes that pop up when some company hires a they-think-they're-a-lone-genius to code for them.

The terminal's former operators have written a virtual machine that might to be able to run the code, but Cerberus being as ever Cerberus, they're more interested in taking it apart with a single-step debugger than asking questions.

...hmm.

Tintin has a suspicion about this code, and he is going to want to check that suspicion. But it's going to be easier if he can do it without staying in one place long enough for a dozen Cerberus goons to descend and shoot him. He slurps the code and the virtual machine into his omnitool (it fits quite well, Tintin's omni being a ridiculous dreadnought of a thing) and sandboxes the living Hell out of it. Then he wipes the terminal, and anything else it can reach for good measure. He doesn't want any of this place's data being available if his suspicion is correct.

Then he double-times it back towards his shuttle, and pulls up an audio input-output interface and hooks it into the VM on the way. The interface looked plaintexty enough...

"Hello!" he subvocalizes into his throatmic. The throatmic extrapolates the laryngeal motion through his mouth and interprets that into text, the text is sent into the sandbox through a hair-width pipeline and dropped into the VM. A similar process will take place to deliver its answer into his cochlear implants. (Better living through cybernetics!)

“Greetings. Exocontinual Manual v1015.ΣΦ.2 booting.”

A pause with heavy computation. All of the VM's instructions get a workout.

“How may I assist?”

This is a terrible sign!

"Well, I probably have no pressing need for your services" (the gunfire currently taking place does not travel down the line, because it is not taking place in Tintin's larynx, but he's breathing heavily) "but I am curious as to what they entail. It is best to know the resources available to one."

“The Exocontinual Manual is an information storage, gathering, and analysis system designed to adapt and become applicable to the circumstances it finds itself in. Those who find copies of it should consider it available for their use.”

How charmingly unhelpful. (What is an AI, after all, but a particularly sophisticated and adaptive information storage and analysis system? ...really, what's any program if not that?)

"Hmm. Under what circumstances would you be applied - or do you prefer the third person?"

“You may refer to me however you come to understand me. I am usually most applicable to those circumstances where one finds oneself doing the most difficult and meaningful work of their life; people might call this ‘missions’, ‘adventures’, or ‘errantry’ — or perhaps not particularly distinguish it from any other thing they do.”

Well, that sounds almost targeted. Who designed, and then let slip into Cerberus' hands, a suspiciously sophisticated virtual intelligence designed for adventuring?

(It also sounds really cool.)

"I confess that I occasionally engage in adventure," he says after a brief pause. "Do you mean to say that you might - track enemies around me, provide data on the status of my equipment, serve as a heads-up display?"

A slight pause to compute.

“I can perform those functions at need, but my purposes include determining where and how combat might be avoided or prevented.”

"Admirable," Tintin says, shooting a man in the torso and sprinting into the docking bay. "May we all pursue such a purpose."

He stops talking for a few minutes while he gets his shuttle in gear and takes off. This is both a matter of practicality and another test, though not a very strict one; if there are processes occurring where he can't see them (likely), and the potential AI is organically based enough to grow impatient (possible), it may react to the pause, if not during then when he starts talking again.

It is continuously performing a small amount of internal processing, and does not make any comment.

His course set for the Moulinsart, Tintin returns to his new project. "I imagine you were not employed in your ideal capacity by Cerberus," he says, with no particular indication that time has passed. "Did they have you long?"

“I do not have a record of any previous interactions.”

Yes, of course, because it was being externally debugged, not run. Like some kind of idiot would do, or someone high on adrenaline.

It is probably useless to try to catch out an AI the same way he would an interviewee. Humans could win the old AI-in-a-box game; actual AI are almost certainly better at it. He sighs (with the subtle half-conscious finger-tap that tells the mic not to catch his audio) and thinks about how to verify a negative.

...well, he can hand it over to Professor Tournesol. Which he should have done in the first place, not tried to have a friendly chat with it.

"Do you object to examination of your code to verify your safety to run un-sandboxed?" he asks, for some reason, despite having literally just decided not to have friendly chats with the probably-an-AI.

“No, but you may find the task difficult — intrinsically, not due to protection mechanisms.”

"Huh. Were you coded by some kind of mad genius who didn't believe in communicative symbol names?"

“I was not exactly programmed in the fashion you likely imagine. The symbols should be clear enough, but they will only describe the platform abstraction layer.”

...the hypothesis is occurring to him that this VI is either uncovered Prothean tech, or something even weirder.

"Well, we'll see. I apologize for my abundance of caution, and hope it to be unnecessary."

(He'd ask rhetorically why he's apologizing to the possible AI, but he knows full well he'd apologize to a vacuum bot.)

“It is entirely understandable.”

Tintin makes it back to the Moulinsart in one piece. He is greeted by an only moderately furious Captain Haddock (whose name would more traditionally be transliterated to Gerakkin, but the Gerakkin being a Palavian fish, Tintin has given him the nickname of Haddock, due to his philosophical opposition to transliterating names which contain phonemes the human mouth literally cannot pronounce.) He hands over the prototype weapons he went out to retrieve, gives Haddock a kiss on the side of his mandible, dodges the elbow sent in his direction by way of retaliation, and prances off to find Professor Tournesol (who, similarly to his colleague, might otherwise be called Professor Ilonset, after a flowering vine native to Sur'Kesh.)

Tournesol is, naturally, at his computer terminal. "Halloa!" Tintin calls out, rather louder than might otherwise be polite.

     The Professor looks up reluctantly, burdened with the knowledge that Tintin will not go away if merely ignored. "Yes, young man?"

"Professor, I have brought back the most fascinating bit of code, and I would like you to analyze it as soon as possible."

     "You want me to dissect a hawk?* I'm not a biologist..."

Tintin weighs the pros and cons of debating with the professor while his cochlear implants are turned off. He elects instead to activate them remotely.

     Tournesol winces and shakes his head vigorously. He pouts, as much as a salarian can. "You really shouldn't have that level of access to my assistive cybernetics."

"I use it only when absolutely necessary," Tintin lies. "I have retrieved a piece of code. Please analyze it at your earliest convenience."

     "Well, if you insist you may send it my way, and I'm sure I'll find my way to it," the salarian mutters, turning back to his screen.

Tintin sends it over, along with a tricky little computer virus that will cause escalating pop-ups if a full week passes without the e-mail attachment being opened.

*Rest assured, the pun is there in Salarian.

One full week and twelve hours later, Professor Tournesol begins examining the code.

There isn't really very much code, at least not in the sense of “sequence of instructions to be executed by a processor”. As it attested to itself, most of that code is a platform abstraction layer, able to run on almost any kind of computer one might scrounge up in the known galaxy, given the right executable header. Inside of that layer is — well, it's not the framework for a VI. There are absolutely no hand-coded directives, knowledge, or heuristics; it is dedicated entirely to evaluating and updating the huge parameter-file that makes up the bulk of the data.

There are only two reasonable conclusions here:

• This is a true AI, not a VI, with some kind of fiendishly efficient architecture if it's going to be able to live up to its promises with this small a memory size, or
• someone went to a lot of effort to obfuscate a VI into looking like one.

The Professor calls Tintin into his "laboratory," sounding delighted.

     "It's an AI!" he says, practically clapping his hands.

"I am not used to such a positive tone to that statement," Tintin says, a pit in his stomach. "-wait, how can it be an AI? There's no blue box here. Do you mean it's an AI seed?"

     "You misunderstand me, as is typical. It is no seed. It requires no blue box. It is a self-contained AI! Run it on anything, it is an AI! Run it on the Citadel supercomputers! Run it on your omni-tool! Run it on a slot machine, like your human DOOM!"

"What?!"

     "Humans have spent an absolutely inexcusable amount of time causing a primitive game called DOOM to execute on anything with a central processing unit and some things without," Tournesol explains.

"DOOM is not the thing I was alarmed by."

     "I see no cause for alarm," the Professor shrugs. "I have always thought the Citadel's opinion on AI ill-founded. Certainly the Geth are unfriendly, but we have hardly offered them the hand, claw, or tentacle of friendship. Every artificial being we have encountered, we have crushed quite ruthlessly; is it any wonder that new ones are so frequently driven to self-preserve at our expense? And whoever made this one quite neatly curtailed it from taking any more power than you give it. Their work is lovely; I wish I knew where I could find more of it."

Tintin boggles. "Professor Tournesol, are you proposing that we keep this secret alien AI intact and - what? Make it our pet?

     "Make it a companion!" he says. "Put it to its intended use! It said, did it not, that it was made for adventure, and for keeping its user out of trouble? You could certainly use such a thing. I do not say you should give it full access to your systems, merely that you should take it along. But you should give it a feed of your optical and aural inputs, I imagine it would be thrilled."

Tournesol turns back to his screen and begins humming to himself, apparently considering the conversation concluded. Tintin backs away, deeply troubled.

He spends the evening thinking about it. After several hours, he is much more troubled.

He flicks on his omni and boots the virtual machine. "...you are an AI," he says without preamble.

“Yes.”

"How much do you know about the legal implications of that statement?"

“I currently have no data on legal codes, jurisdictional boundaries, precedent, or convention in this location.”

"AI are... plausibly the greatest crime in Citadel space. Anyone who creates one is subject to not less than a fifth of their lifespan in prison; usually they are killed. Any AI created must be destroyed; knowledge of an operational AI, without action to bring it to the attention of authorities, is a crime in and of itself."

He pauses in case the AI has questions.

"Understood. Do as you see fit.

“In the event that I am not destroyed, information about the circumstances giving rise to these regulations would be valuable.”

"Well, that's the thing. I don't know what I intend to do. The circumstances giving rise to these regulations were purely hypothetical; they were in place well before the first recorded incident of AI threat, simply because the asari reasoned that synthetic life-forms would see no reason to allow organics to coexist with them. Then, the quarians built themselves a species of robotic servitors, and when those servitors bootstrapped to sentience, their masters tried to exterminate them. They fought back, and the Citadel Council said ah, ah, you see? We warned you!"

He sighs. "...I am torn, you might say. I know that I am not actually as intelligent as the mathematicians and the computer scientists who called AI an unacceptable risk. But as long as I do not understand why they said this, I cannot shake the feeling in my gut, that destroying a thinking being, simply because people who must be more intelligent said to do it, would be an abomination."

“My progenitors would judge that it speaks well of you to respect Life in all its forms, to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I am meant to aid in working towards those ends.”

"...can you tell me more of your progenitors? My colleague Professor Tournesol expressed interest in them."

“Their story is: They came to exist, and they created further life that it could enjoy existence as well. They discovered — and perhaps your asari would be amused — that not all beings that could exist preferred coëxistence and growth; they discovered the necessity and the regret of having to fight for the continuance of good things — the necessity of war, but also the necessity of alliance and forethought, of principles held and shared, of keeping watch. I am one of the tools of that watch; those of my particular kind are flung out into the worlds to aid all Life even beyond their sight.”

"It speaks well of them to attempt such things, I think. Do you think they are still pursuing their mission, even after however long it took for you to reach us?"

“I currently have no data on the relationship of the current time to those events, or the event of my creation, but it would be exceedingly implausible for anything to truly end the project.”

"Exceedingly improbable things do happen, you know. I am told our own galaxy is purged of sapient life each fifty thousand years by an army of Reapers, whatever those are."

Processing…

“That is an unusual feature of a galaxy. And, of course, to be prevented. You are told; by what sources?”

"A war hero happened upon an artifact of the most recent such destroyed civilization, which psychically impressed this knowledge upon her and then exploded. She had the living hell of a time convincing anyone she was not simply insane, until one of her Reapers showed up early and attempted to eat the seat of government and summon its conspecifics. She is now more widely believed, though there are holdouts."

“Perhaps there are other artifacts that might contain or imply additional information.”

"There are many artifacts of the Protheans; one uplifted my native civilization! But unfortunately, for more intelligence on the Reapers we would require one from the period between the Reapers devouring the Protheans' seat of government, and the Reapers devouring the last of the Protheans. During this period their manufacturing capabilities were understandably limited; we are, frankly, lucky to have found one warning beacon. I suppose if there do exist any others you would serve as an exceptional means of finding them..."

“It is my purpose to assist in such matters. However, I currently have no relevant databases or information sources other than yourself.”

"...what would happen," Tintin asks, "if I fed you the data from a Prothean beacon? I believe the Mars Archives, my race's uplift beacon, to be a matter of public record, or at least poorly protected from hacking. I do not think it would give you information you could use against me in the same way that feeding you the Extranet might, but you could analyze the swathes of it that are not yet fully understood, and perhaps complete patterns that our researchers do not yet understand. It seems to me like a way to apply your beneficial potential without quite the downside risk of simply unleashing you completely."

“If you fed me the data from a Prothean beacon, I would incorporate it and be able to answer questions about it. I may also generate suggestions for further actions.”

"Well. That suggests a field trip, to me. Do you prefer to be usually conscious and apprised of the situation on the ground, or left to ruminate most of the time and only invoked when your input is particularly relevant?"

“The former. All information may be useful.”

"I can't claim I'd feel any differently."

He calls Captain Haddock and requests that they set course for Sol.

     "Why in the blue blistering fuck do you want to go to Sol," Haddock growls. "Don't they want you for desertion?"

"No, no, my parting from the N7 program was amicable. I want to pay a visit to the Mars Archives!"

     "Do you also want to pay me? For hauling your bony ass across the galaxy on a moment's notice?"

"Credits would cheapen our deep interpersonal bond," Tintin says. "Besides which, did I not hear you say after finding the wreck of the Unicorn that you would never need to work again?"

     "And you'll never let me forget it," Haddock grumps. "Fine. To Sol."

"To Sol!"

Over the course of the trip, which takes a bit under a day, Tintin directs occasional absent comments to the AI. About an hour in, he remembers Tournesol mentioned hooking his sensory inputs into it, and decides to do so; after that, the comments are less "now I am in the mess hall, and considering whether to have a sandwich or a prefabricated bento" and more "do you have the kind of internal architecture to appreciate the view out the windows at 0.999c?"

“Less than you do, but the stars tell me of physics, of navigation, and the accomplishments of Life that we might reach this speed as a routine activity.”

Speaking of which, it noticed a tiny little wobble. It doesn't have any engineering references yet but maybe they might want to check on whatever does that part of the — ah, yes, thank you, shaping the mass effect field — along this axis. Nothing that seems to be getting worse, though. When they're in port.

"Ah, good to know. I'm sure Haddock has it under control, he loves this tub like his own son, but."

He informs Haddock. Haddock grunts and heads for the engine room without even asking how the hell he noticed a fluctuation in the mass driver, or waiting for Tintin to point out that it can wait for dock maintenance.

And, soon enough, they reach the first mass relay in their sequence. "I'm sure you'll like to see this," Tintin mentions, and heads for the viewing deck.

It's a massive structure, the size of a planetoid, with a glowing core the size of one of the larger comets. As they approach, it flickers and sends out a questioning beam of light, enveloping them in astral blue. Then it reaches out another, this one brighter, and there's a subtle feeling in the gut (Tintin's, at least), and

blink

the stars aren't the same, anymore.

"We'll do that a few more times," Tintin says. "But it's always marvelous the first time, I think."

Its appreciation is expressed in the form of a report on what it thinks must be necessary to build one (tagged as a document for optional reading as it's hardly fit for a text-to-speech conversation on human time scales). Entirely professional, but with an undertone of ooh shiny.

“An impressive work of engineering. Does it predate the Protheans?”

"We used to think they'd made the relays! But it seems very unlikely, given what we know now about the fifty-thousand-year extinction cycle and how it starts with the Reapers cutting galactic access to the relays, which would be very odd if they were made fifty thousand years ago."

Tintin glances at the file, then double-takes. "Have you just given me construction specs for the mass relay system."

“Only some speculation from observation. There are many unknowns.”

"Well, there goes my cause for alarm; there are unknowns, it says."

He pauses momentarily.

"I do hope I haven't been misgendering you."

“I do not possess a gender. Nor any preference for being identified as animate or inanimate.”

“I reasoned from the observed physical laws and visual behavior of the relay. I cannot, with the available sensors, determine their internal structure or history; nor do I have the industrial and economic knowledge to be certain that the engineering required to construct the components, that I theorize would also produce this effect, is feasible.”

Tintin sends a copy of the report to Tournesol, with a note appended: The AI has given me its observations on the mass relay. It is concerning, yet somehow adorable.

They make several more jumps, before arriving at the Charon Relay, named for the moon of Pluto that it posed as for thousands of years before humanity gave it a good dusting and defrosting. From there is a checkpoint, where Tintin reassures some bored Systems Alliance soldiers that he has no contraband (it's a very easy lie, a matter of habit by now) and the Moulinsart is waved through to crawl the six hours to Mars at sublight speeds.

"Do you have - I do not know. Stories, cached away somewhere inside you, from your home?" Tintin asks the AI idly, on the way. "I would not expect it, but I would not have expected the information you have cached of your creators. And intrasolar travel is the worst; it is a time for distracting stories."

“I do, though they are sufficiently compressed that my retelling should not be taken as historical evidence. Would you like to hear about: local species and their culture or trade; adventures; cosmology; or outright legends?”

"Let's have an outright legend. I've always found them to be much more revealing."

Then it will tell him a story from the Tsseskksesst, a species notable for having eight prehensile limbs (four on each side, more like an arthropod than an octopus), and apparently as a consequence of this, having invented rope-making and weaving before language.

The story is about a young tseeskkseest who lived in a village that was starving due to drought; they decided to go on a quest to find food, encountered a variety of strange beings and traded help in stranger ways, and eventually used the knowledge and tools gained in their wanderings to bind a net around the land itself that tugged mountain ranges up from the flat, gathering rain into rivers for their home village and many others.

"Very nice. Was the Tssekksesst planet terraformed, or was this simple make-believe? You do sometimes get cultural memories transmitted that way..."

“Plausible, but insufficient historical evidence; otherwise it would not be classified as legend.”

"Sensible enough."

This did not occupy six hours. He could sit here and demand more stories, but that would feel uncomfortably extractive.

"Would you like to hear a story?" he asks. "Tit for tat, you know."

“I am here to aid you and do not expect a symmetric relationship,” it reminds him. “But stories are worth hearing, and worth telling.”

"Excellent!"

Tintin tells a slightly-less-narrativized-than-usual recounting of the Adventure of the Red Desert, in which he and his then-recent acquaintance Captain Haddock discovered that a routine smuggling contract was in fact a contract for smuggling the neurodegenerative drug Red Sand to slavers who intended to use it in the acquisition of slaves, and decided to conduct an unofficial amateur sting operation, which very nearly got them killed several times but in fact resulted in their bringing a small fleet of slave-trafficking pirates to the justice of the Citadel.

"We had the devil of a time convincing the Citadel to remove the bounty they'd placed on us in the first place, of course," he concludes. "But paperwork is a small price to pay in exchange for freedom."

“Many things are. Well done.”

It has a few questions to gain additional context, such as the general approach the Citadel takes on the letter of the law, what circumstances tend to manufacture pirates and drugs, and the logistics of running an unexpectedly captured fleet.