Can we take a moment to talk about how cute are those motherfuckers?
Please, Tamos. Don’t call me ‘ma’am’. It makes me feel really weird.
*she tilts her head in thought then nods lightly* Some cultures allow their children to name themselves when they get older. You have unwittingly followed the tradition. I find it interesting. You can connect the dots yourself.
*Flaps clamp down and lens dilates.* O-oh. I apologize, ma—Shepard-Commander. I will cease.
*More fidgeting, but it’s flaps relax into a sort-of smile, slowly.* …Yes, I… suppose I have. *It pauses for a moment in thought, then meets her gaze again, somewhat hopefully.*
Was there… there anything else you wanted to know?
*she smiles before reaching out, gently rubbing one of his flaps. Technically, geth were genderless but she preferred thinking of them as male or female, rather than an ‘it’. The word made them seem… non-sentient.*
When Legion plugged me into the server on Rannoch… I didn’t hear anyone except for him. Are you not constantly broadcasting? Or did I just not reach consensus and was simply on the outside?
*Tamos flinches at the touch, but remains deathly still until it realizes she means it no harm—logically, it knew she didn’t, but it’s sub-processes were always wary. Hesitantly, it leans into the touch, then, wiggling its flaps under her fingers just a bit.*
That… was a unique circumstance. The geth in that server were hostile. Legion deliberately kept them out of your… ‘mind’, in a sense; they could have hurt you. We can choose to be quiet, of course, even in a server, but I believe Legion used… something akin to mental blinders. Even if they could or would not hurt you directly, that… large an amount of input could simply overload your senses—or the system used to connect you to the server, before the input ever reached you. Both possibilities were obviously… undesirable.
*she frowns a little when she watches the geth jerk under her touch. The frown fades when he leans into the touch much like a cat or a dog might. Gently her fingerpads rub along the smooth metal of Tamos’s flaps*
*she thinks on his explanation then nods a little it* I’ve been in a noisy server before, if you catch my meaning. It wasn’t fun… I had a headache for days afterward.
*she still found herself in a sweat over what she saw at Project Overlord. How one could do such terrible things to their own family was beyond her*
I figured he had protected me somehow. I still feel bad I had to silence them. Did they ever get brought back online? Those who survived re-entry into Rannoch?
Tamos made a low whirring sound that might have been digital purring as it enjoyed her petting. In the back of its mind, it accessed some data files. “…Yes, I recall that instance, vaguely.” The geth involved in that project had returned to the Consensus rather shaken, themselves. Some were transferred to the quiet Zela-Ai, where Tamos and Qael resided at the time.
Tamos closed those data files quickly, focusing on the happier answer to her question. Its flaps lifted in a grin. “They are fine. We had lost enough—too many, in fact—in the Creator’s initial attack on the Unity, so were determined to not lose anymore. It took a great deal of… ‘shuffling’ programs between hardware, but we were successful. You were only forced to destroy hardware; you did not kill any of us, and neither did the Creators in the final battle, nor atmospheric reentry as a result of the Creators’ attacks. The Old Machine insisted we allow some to be lost, but their control was not so thorough as to make us… let them die, when we could save them, even if doing so could be seen as… a ‘waste of resources’.
“Additionally,” it paused, ‘grin’ softening as it tilted its head into her hand again, “Prime was among those on the server you entered—it was a collection of 2,567 programs, at the time—who were transferred to mobile server platforms. It has since repainted its platform, obviously, but… I believe you may have pointed your gun at it, at one point.” Its flaps, save the one under her hand, fluttered in amusement.
(via spectrewolf)
