Hi, hello. I’m trying to do more stuff here, so here’s a link to my Ao3, and here’s my Subnautica sideblog: @drowned-cypress. Below you’ll find the things I’ve been working on writing lately. Please send me questions about any of them because writing alone with no feedback is hard.
Morrowind Time Loop Fic
Working Title: The Hero’s Endeavor
Estimated Length: 700,000 to 1,000,000 words (not even exaggerating)
Current Progress: 27 of 28 "chapters" outlined. 39,000 words written. My outline and notes are 25k words long… I know exactly what happens in every chapter except the last, and as a result I’ve been writing scenes entirely out of order.
Summary:
Bolag gro-Umzolabesh is not a good person. When he gets released from prison onto the island of Vvardenfell, he wallows in his own selfishness and sadism until the consequences of his own poor choices start to catch up with him, and he gets ruthlessly murdered. Death is not the end for Bo though, and he discovers himself back on the boat to Vvardenfell, about to be released again. But is this really the golden opportunity that he believes it is? Seizing the chance to get preemptive revenge turns out to be Bo's worst idea yet, as bad planning and pissing off the wrong people always result in a painful and harrowing reset without the final relief of death. Bo must learn to cope with a world that just keeps going, whether he wants it to or not, even if he dies, and in which everything seems to go wrong no matter what he does. Exhausted and traumatized, he just wants to know why this is happening to him, but seeking answers involves investigating mysteries he could never have conceived of before, and traveling a lot farther than he ever dreamed of going.
In which the protagonist gets trapped in a time loop and discovers the multiple ways that Tamriel is poised on the brink of disaster, and what happens when nobody saves the world.
Basic Premise: Trapping the protagonist in a time loop until they experience character growth. The protagonist has to figure out why this is happening. Delves a lot into the cosmology of The Elder Scrolls, and doesn’t limit the story to any one geographic region (we’re going to Akavir at some point.) This story asks questions like: How does a bad person become a good person? What happens to the world when the hero refuses the call? If Dagoth Ur won, what would that look like? This is primarily a story about self actualization and overcoming trauma, but it also deals with things like the consequences of Imperialism, and the interplay between systems of oppression. Canon divergent. Transgender orc protagonist. Eventual orc/dunmer pairing very late in the story. The shipping is beside the point; learning to love is part of the main character’s growth arc.
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Mass Effect Andromeda Isekai Fic
Working Title: Mass Effect Androgyny (not sticking with that lol)
Estimated Length: 200,000 to 300,000 words
Current Progress: 18 chapters out of an unknown amount outlined; 12 chapters completed (or mostly completed); 82,000 words written. I’m writing this mostly in order, and I’m only outlining a few chapters ahead of my current progress, so I’m not even sure where this is going.
Summary:
You die. Your father sacrifices himself for you, but you still die. Temporarily.
When you wake up again, you're not the same anymore. You’ve got a whole new set of memories, a life you remember living, both similar and completely different from the life you remember living as Sara Ryder. You remember the 21st century, and an age before humanity’s first contact.
But most unsettling of all, you remember a video game.
You know exactly what's about to happen, and you desperately don't want to do it alone.
Basic Premise: The memories of a modern person get put into the head of the main character allowing a level of foresight and planning that would not otherwise be possible. How would a relatively average modern person cope with the stresses and ethical dilemmas of Mass Effect Andromeda? Involves a lot of second guessing the butterfly effect, an exploration of what sharing your head with a sentient AI would actually be like, and the difficulties of first contact with a sapient alien species. Heavy focus on fleshing out interpersonal relationships. This isn’t a coming of age story; it’s a story about overcoming isolation. Written in the second person, but the main character isn’t a reader insert. Canon divergent. Non-binary protagonist. SAM/Ryder/Jaal pairing.
You can find a few excerpts under the tag #mass effect andromeda isekai fic
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Subnautica Below Zero Disaster Survival Fic
Working Title: Point of Failure
Estimated Length: 80,000 words (Maybe more. I am incapable of brevity.)
Current Progress: Preliminary outline in progress; 700 words written. I still haven’t figured out where I’m going with this one.
Summary:
Robin’s seatruck is attacked by a chelicerate on the way back to her base and she escapes with only the seatruck’s cabin module, abandoning her destroyed storage module in the process. Unfortunately, her lost storage module contained her only working habitat builder. When she gets back to her base, she discovers another disaster has transpired: a massive storm has taken out all of her base’s electrical systems, including her fabricator. Upon trying to recoup her losses using the fabricator in her drop pod, she discovers that her drop pod is nowhere to be found–swept away by the same storm. Without a habitat builder, Robin can’t fix her base or build a new fabricator. Without a fabricator, Robin can’t make a new habitat builder. Robin realizes she must survive with no fabrication tech and no plan as winter rapidly approaches, causing the surface of the ocean to begin to freeze.
Basic Premise: How much can go wrong before survival becomes an impossibility? Robin is stuck homesteading on an alien planet without futuristic tools. Robin implements a lot of old-school survival techniques Little House on the Prairie style, and figures out how to cook with local ingredients. Al-An gets a healthy dose of existential angst induced by the fragility of human existence. Character study of the interactions between Robin and Al-An. Potential Robin/Al-An pairing.
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I will post excerpts on request. If anybody wants to RP or do collaborative writing in any of these three fandoms, message me.
Mass Effect Andromeda Appreciation Week Day 5: New Friendships
Once the meeting room clears out, it’s just you and Jaal. “Last chance to get anything from Aya before we take off,” you tell him.
“Not necessary,” he replies. “I have everything I need.”
You shrug and open your omnitool interface, sending the navpoint for Voeld to Kallo with instructions to take off as soon as the ship is ready for it.
“Come with me, please?” you ask Jaal.
He tilts his head to one side and follows you down the ramp out of the meeting room.
“I have something I would like to offer you,” you tell him, heading toward the front of the ship.
“A gift?” he asks.
“Not precisely,” you say. “More like a trust exercise. Or a promise.”
You lead him down to the lowest level, then across the ship and through the door to what used to be your cabin. “This is the room where most of the ground crew sleeps,” you tell him. “Except Peebee, because she has trust issues, so she sleeps in the escape pod.”
“That seems…” Jaal stops, grasping for words.
“Excessively symbolic?” you laugh. “A little bit, yeah. Anyway, that’s my bed.” You point to the king sized bed behind its screen. “In case you ever want to kill me in my sleep, you know.”
Jaal stares at you incredulously. You burst out laughing. “Sorry! I couldn’t resist! Oh my gods, your face!”
Jaal huffs out a breath and looks away from you. “You are mocking me.”
You stop laughing immediately. “No. I’m not. I’m sorry for laughing. I’m not trying to mock you.”
He continues to avoid looking at you. “You are taunting me then, with false expressions of trust.”
Your stomach sinks. You knew you had been freaking him out. You had acted too familiar for the level of relationship he perceived between the two of you, and now he thought you were being insincere. “I’m not taunting you, I promise. It was intended as friendly teasing.”
Jaal’s head whips around and he stares at you intently. “What kind of person ignores a threat and deliberately enables circumstances to allow it to be carried out? Do you want to die? Do you simply not take my abilities seriously?”
“No!” You shake your head emphatically. “I’m very aware you’re probably stronger than me. I haven’t seen your abilities, but you’re a lot larger than me, and you seem like a very physically strong person. You’re also in a military group, so I don’t doubt you have the training. I believe you could kill me if you wanted to. I don’t want to die, but I’m also fairly confident you don’t want to kill me. You seem like a reasonable person to me. You’re not going to kill me on a whim. I don’t think you’re the kind of person who would hurt me so long as I keep demonstrating that I don't mean you any harm. And since I have no intention of doing anything else, I’m not worried. I was flippant about it though, and I’m sorry for making you think I was insincere.”
Jaal narrows his eyes at you, then tilts his head first to the left, then the right. His expression loses its hard edge. “Alright.”
“Alright?” you ask.
“I will accept that.”
“Alright.” You let out a long breath. You’d assumed a level of friendship that didn’t exist yet because you liked Jaal and you knew more about him than he realized. Your familiar attitude had nearly been disastrous; you couldn’t make mistakes like that. You had to establish a real friendship before it happened again.
“To be honest…” you start hesitantly. “I think you're really interesting. I would like the two of us to be friends–more than just people who’ve been thrown together by circumstance and have to learn to work together.”
“Really?” Jaal asks. “I had thought perhaps you were merely tolerating my presence for the sake of diplomacy.”
“What? No!” you exclaim. How can you explain this in terms he will understand? You have very little shared interaction to rely on, but perhaps that will be enough. “You stood up to Evfra for me,” you explain. "You had the intelligence and creativity to find a resolution to an impasse with no easily apparent solution. You had the bravery and openness to experience to face the unknown and join a ship full of aliens who you know nothing about and have no reason to trust. You had the moral character to pursue a peaceful solution even when it wasn't easy and put you at personal risk. You're exactly the kind of person I want to be friends with!”
“That is a very… lenient interpretation,” Jaal says with a frown. “Perhaps my presence has nothing to do with you; maybe I have certain personal dissatisfactions that I’d like to leave behind.”
“Even if your motivation had nothing to do with us, it was still a brave and open-minded thing you did,” you counter.
Jaal purses his lips. “Perhaps I am imposing myself on you because I am a fool who let my curiosity get the better of me.”
“First off, I want you here,” you assure him earnestly. “I’m thrilled you’re here. Your presence is not an imposition. But more to the point, curiosity–wonder about the universe–is one of the things that makes life worth living. It's good to be curious, and I don’t believe you’re a fool.”
The set of Jaal’s jaw acquires a stubborn cast to it. “Then perhaps I am merely using you to get what I want, and help my people in the process. Perhaps I am merely gathering information about your weaknesses so that my people may defend themselves against you. You are insightful enough to have thought of these things.”
You nearly smile. All of his points are the absolute truth as he sees it, but framed as hypotheticals. He’s also testing your willingness to interpret his actions in good faith. You feel a wash of fondness for this absurd alien.
“Are you really using me if you’re only taking advantage of something I am offering you freely?” you ask. “And it’s natural for you to want to feel less vulnerable; I would be a fool to think you would not try to uncover more about my people than we would readily tell you. Of course you are going to try to find out about our weaknesses and pass that knowledge on to your people–I expect it. That doesn’t prevent us from being friends. I know things about the biology of every species on my crew that would allow me to more easily kill them if I wanted to, but we still work together and make friends amongst ourselves.”
“And again you take the most forgiving point of view.” Jaal passes his hand over the top of his head, looking vaguely distressed. “I don’t know what to think of you. I keep thinking you cannot possibly be genuine, but you have been explicit about what you want from my people, and why. I fear you are not being transparent about your motives. I fear this may be an elaborate ruse. I fear that something will go wrong and you will abandon your attempts at diplomacy. But the mere fact that your crew, your Initiative, has so many species working together makes me hopeful that your people will cooperate with mine the way you do with each other. I do wonder how, despite your apparent conviction and clarity of vision, you are not worried that it is my people who might betray you, though.”
You sigh. “My people aren’t perfect, you know? No group is. There’s always individuals who make stupid choices, who are selfish, who are intolerant, who are violent, who want to control everyone around them. I’m not going to make the mistake of believing that your people are any different. As long as those people aren’t the ones in authority, then I am not worried your people will turn on us. The leaders of your people that I have met so far don’t strike me as people like that. If we do encounter individuals like that among your people, I am not going to judge your people as a whole based on those individuals’ actions. That wouldn’t be fair. And I hope you will extend me the same courtesy when we inevitably encounter individuals like that among my people.”
Jaal tilts his head to the left, then the right. “I will keep it in mind.”
“So… friends?” you ask hopefully.
“I do not yet know if I can trust you,” Jaal tells you seriously, looking into your eyes with uncomfortable intensity. “I am not certain you are not simply trying to flatter me. But it would be foolish of me to turn your offer down.”
You have mixed feelings about this. It sounds like he feels like you’ve backed him into a corner, which isn’t really what you wanted to do. “You’re not obligated to accept, you know. I won’t be offended.” You’d be a little hurt, but not offended. “I don’t want you to feel like you have no choice.” It’s not real if he has no choice.
Something in Jaal’s face relaxes minutely. “I am willing to try.”
You let out a long breath. That’s probably the best you’re going to get. “Okay, that brings me to the thing I wanted to offer you. One sec.”
You walk behind the screen to your small bedroom area and duck to retrieve a small flat metal box from under your bed.
“Cypress, are you certain about this?” SAM asks over your private channel. “He threatened to kill you.”
“He’s not going to kill me, SAM,” you respond, putting one hand on your own shoulder while Jaal couldn’t see you. “He was just being protective of his people. I appreciate that you’re worried about me though.”
You pick up the box and return to Jaal.
“This is a trust exercise.” You open the box to let him look inside. “This has a bunch of blueprint sheets in it with some stuff written on them that I would like to tell you when we know each other better, but I’m not ready to tell you yet. It’s nothing bad, just stuff that’s personal to me, that takes some vulnerability to share.”
“And you’re giving it to me?” Jaal asks.
You take the folded blueprint sheets out, show him that the box is otherwise empty, put the sheets back in, then close the box and spin the locking mechanism.
“Friendship is reciprocal, you know?” You hand him the box. “I’m trying to earn your trust, but I want to be able to know I can trust you too. You could probably break into that box if you really tried, but I don’t want you to do that. I want you to take the box and hide it somewhere safe. Sometime after we’ve been to Voeld and maybe Havarl, once we’ve had more of a chance to talk to each other and I’ve proven myself to your satisfaction, I’ll ask you to bring it back to me so I can unlock it and we can read the contents together. If you haven’t broken into the box before that, then I’ll know I can trust you not to betray my confidence.”
“Is this a trust exercise, or a test of my restraint?” Jaal asks bemusedly.
“Probably both,” you answer with a smile. “Is it too much?”
“No. As tests go, it is practically trivial.”
“Good.” You smile at him. “Hide it somewhere I don’t know about, somewhere you’re certain I won’t tamper with it. Put a monitoring device on it if you want. Entrust it to someone on Voeld if you’re worried that isn’t enough, or if you think your self control isn’t up for it. I want you to have no doubt that these are things I planned to tell you from the beginning, alright?”
He tilts his head to the left, then the right, and tucks the box under his arm.
You pause and point at him. “Hey, what does that thing you just did mean?”
“What?” he asks, confused.
“This,” you say, demonstrating the head tilt.
His eyes widen slightly. “Oh. It means I agree.”
“Oh!” you exclaim. “There’s a human gesture that means basically the same thing. It’s like this.” You demonstrate a nod.
He narrows his eyes at you. “I see.”
“It means ‘yes,’” you explain. “There’s a corresponding gesture that means ‘no’ too. Like this.” You shake your head.
“I had wondered.”
“I’ve been so stressed all day,” you confess, “trying to figure out angaran body language with no context. I was worried I’d do something accidentally insulting. A surprising amount of our body language seems to translate, but I’m not sure it all actually means the same thing.”
Jaal’s expression turns troubled. “That… is a concern that had not occurred to me.”
“Yeah, well, growing up I had to learn the basics of body language for something like eight different sentient species,” you explain, “so it’s kind of always been a concern for me.”
“That is a lot of species,” Jaal muses. “So, not all the body language you use might be human?”
“Yeah, when I’m addressing someone of a different species.”
“That will complicate my attempts to learn.”
“Maybe, or you could just ask, like I did.”
Jaal ducks his head in an approximation of a human nod. You smile and try an angaran head tilt. His eyes light up.
Mass Effect Andromeda Appreciation Week Day 4: The Andromeda Galaxy
The Moshae approaches the huge door of the vault. You follow closely behind her. “Jaal has been telling me about his experience with your crew,” she says in a casual tone.
“All good things, I hope.”
“He’s quite taken with you.” She glances at you out of the corner of her eye with a sly smile.
“He told me he feels he’s making a difference,” you say. “I’m glad he finds the work we’re doing rewarding.”
“As am I.” The Moshae puts her hand on the door’s controls. After a moment, the door opens for her.
“You can operate the door?” you ask, with raised brows. You’d known that there were angara that could operate pieces of Remnant tech. You hadn’t realized the Moshae was one of them. You probably shouldn’t have been so surprised; how else was she supposed to get in?
“It took me many years to figure it out, but yes,” she replies. “I wasn’t sure I could still do it.”
The pair of you walk down the wide corridor. There’s no sign of Remnant machines, but it looks like the plantlife of Aya has made itself at home, even in the darkness of the ruin. Spots of bioluminescent lichen dot the walls and floor.
“I haven’t brought anyone here in over twenty years,” the Moshae muses as you enter the next room. It’s massive, if beginning to break down. The left wall has crumbled, and some kind of large fern has sprouted in the exposed soil. The Moshae leads you to the controls of a holographic emitter at the center of the room. “There’s always been an active display for Aya, but we could never affect it.”
You smile. “You must be even more excited about this than I am,” you comment as you extend your hand over the control panel. SAM activates your omnitool, and the display for the vault network appears–a massive starmap that covers the entirety of the Heleus cluster.
“Good job,” you silently comment to SAM. He doesn’t respond.
The Moshae observes the starmap, expression rapt. “Yes! This is new!”
You’ve seen a map like this before, but it’s still amazing to you. There’s so many vaults, connected together with lines like constellations. How widespread was angara territory supposed to be? The scale of the Jardaan terraforming operation is mind boggling, and they had to have done it over the course of less than a couple hundred years. The Initiative’s maps of the Andromeda galaxy are over six hundred years old now, but they were nearly contemporary when they were made. The geth-technology-based surveys they were made with wouldn’t have missed activity on this scale, which means that the vaults can’t be older than six hundred years. But angara history has no record of their construction, so the Jardaan had to have been gone for at least four hundred years. Are they still out there somewhere? Is it even okay that you plan to take some of these planets for your own people when they were terraformed specifically for the angara?
It has to be; you’ll make it alright if you have to, make your presence worthwhile to the angara. Your people’s survival depends on those worlds.
You study the starmap; there are three larger symbols in addition to the connected dots of vaults. The largest is the symbol of Meridian: an equilateral triangle with a short leg radiating from each of the corners. Then there are two unembellished equilateral triangles: one solid, and one only a blinking outline. The solid one is in the correct position to be Aya. You reach up to tap it, hoping the display is interactive. The symbol becomes larger and brighter–highlighted. You’re not sure what to do with it.
“Is it similar to the vault on Eos?” the Moshae asks behind you. “Tell me, what are you seeing?”
“Very similar,” you answer. “SAM, could you overlay this starmap with the one we saw on Eos? I want to see the differences.”
The display of your omnitool changes immediately. You hold it up for the Moshae to see. The only things not on both maps are the triangle around Eos’ dot and the symbol of Meridian. “There,” you point to Meridian. “That wasn’t on the Eos map. The vaults on the network all connect to this place. It has to be the control center.”
The Moshae leans in to see your omnitool, then looks up at the large starmap in front of you. “This image was on a relic the Archon showed me. He called it Meridian. And it looks like Aya’s vault is the only one that’s fully connected to it.”
“The vault on Eos is also present, but changed,” SAM points out through your omnitool speaker. “Our interfacing with it has affected its connection.” He’s right; the triangular outline around Eos blinks as though the connection is erratic, but it is active.
“Is that your AI?” the Moshae asks, looking at your omnitool. “The one who blew up the exaltation facility?”
“Oh, yes,” you respond. “That’s SAM. He’s the reason I can interface with Remnant technology.”
“Hello, Moshae Sjefa,” SAM says.
“Hello,” the Moshae offers before going back to examining the starmap, bringing up her own wrist tool and pointing it at the map.
“What about Habitat 7, SAM?” you ask. Your father did something to the vault on that planet, you just weren’t sure what.
SAM highlights a dot on your omnitool. “Active connection to Meridian is either not established, or not detectable from Aya or Eos.”
“But my father did something to make the storm clear,” you say, trying to make sense of it.
“The storm was most likely the result of malfunctioning terraforming equipment,” SAM states. “By resetting the vault, your father was able to force the vault to stop exacerbating the storm, but likely did not reestablish its connection to Meridian.”
“Okay then.” You think for a moment. “Could you highlight the other habitats the Initiative identified? Are they all on this map?” They should be; but you should probably show Initiative leadership the evidence if they haven’t already figured it out themselves.
SAM highlights six additional dots, including Eos. You recognize the location of Voeld. The rest of them must be Havarl, Kadara, Elaaden, and the broken world that would have been the turian habitat if it hadn’t been destroyed by the Scourge. You’re going to need to visit all of them.
“So what this means is we need to get to Meridian,” you comment. “We can reactivate all the vaults from there, make them start terraforming again. We could fix what the Scourge broke; make these planets habitable again.”
“Wait,” the Moshae interjects.” The Archon knows where it is. He’s already been there.”
Or he just thinks he has. “If he was able to use it,” you reply grimly, “he would have tried to use the terraforming network to make the planets less habitable, to drive anyone living on these planets into space for easier capture. Since he hasn’t done that, either he doesn’t know how, or Meridian isn’t functional.”
“Of course…” the Moshae says as though talking to herself, “that’s why he tortured me. He thought I could help him use it.
“If he figures it out, all of us are in trouble. We have to take it from him.” You want to be unambiguous about your intentions with the Moshae.
“Agreed. Such power in the hands of such evil could mean the end of all of us.”
You’ve intercepted messages that would seem to indicate that the kett are very anti-AI, so you’re pretty sure you have time before they make any kind of breakthrough, but just to be clear, you say, “I’m going to stop him, for all our sakes.”
The Moshae gives you a firm angaran nod. “I will assist.”
“SAM, does this starmap give us an accurate location for Meridian?” you ask, knowing the answer is probably no.
“Unlikely,” SAM replies. “The metadata does not contain coordinates for Meridian the way it does for other locations on the map, and Meridian’s symbol on this map does not correspond with any known star system. It appears to be outside the galaxy’s ecliptic plane. It is possible that Meridian is not located in a star system, but it is more likely that this is an abstract representation for a control center that is designed to be mobile.”
“So we’re going to need to find it,” you confirm.
The Moshae makes a noise of comprehension. “You’re going to need that relic I saw. The Resistance might have intel on the whereabouts of the Archon’s ship. I’ll talk to Evfra and secure his full cooperation. Meet me there.”
Mass Effect Andromeda Appreciation Week Day 3: Characters
It takes you longer to get to Techiix than you expect. By the time you arrive, light filtering through the snowy atmosphere has started to fade, temperatures have started to drop to dangerous levels again, and you’re glad you don’t have to keep driving in complete darkness. Inside, Jaal leads you through the cave containing the village, straight to a building near the back.
You and your team file inside to find a female angara on a call with the Resistance base commander. You give her a cheeky wave and wait for her to finish her call, which consists mostly of complaining that her brother, Niilj, had failed to update her about his rescue.
Her name is Buxil, and she is eager to take the data drive Niilj gave you. It turns out the data drive contains quite a bit more data than expected. She excuses herself, wanting to look it over in more depth. You request a place to stay for the night, and you get bedrolls on the floor of an empty room. At least this time the floor isn't ice, so you're willing to strip down to your under-armor and bask in the warmth of the room’s heat lamp more comfortably.
You fall asleep fairly quickly. The day had given you three combat engagements, and the adrenaline spikes always leave you a bit exhausted. Falling asleep early means you wake up in the middle of the night though.
You sit up on your bedroll and regard the other members of your squad in the low light of the heat lamp. They're all fast asleep. Drack is curled on his stomach, still in armor. Liam has sprawled out on his back with his arms thrown above his head and his mouth open. Jaal has taken a position halfway on his side, curled with his back to the light of the heat lamp, snoring like a freight train. It's the most undignified you’ve seen him.
“Good morning, SAM,” you subvocalize over your private channel. You wrap your arms around yourself to give SAM a hug. “How are you doing?”
“Good morning, Cypress. I am performing at optimum efficiency at present.”
You smile. He never knows how to answer that question. “How long have we got until sunrise?”
“There are approximately seven hours until daylight.”
You make a face. This is the problem with planets with long day cycles. You should probably try to get a nap in a few hours just to compensate. In the meantime, you have to figure out what to do with yourself.
You consider exploring the daar to talk to any of the angara that might be awake, but you don't want to put your armor back on yet.
There is always paperwork. Tann craves reports like an addict. You suspect his need for control is his way of coping with feelings of helplessness and anxiety, but you do not have the brainpower to write reports just after waking up. You don't have the brainpower to study Shelesh, either.
You poke around on your omnitool for a bit before bringing up the piano keyboard program. You set the thing to project onto the ground next to your bedroll, and route the sound through your audio implants. One song turns into another, turns into attempting to figure out a song you only halfway remember. You play with the arrangement and left hand accompaniment for a bit.
“What are you doing?”
You look up and see Jaal propped up on one arm, watching you. His pupils are wider than you’ve seen them before, probably as a result of the low light. You catch a flash of reflection from the back of them, like a cat’s eyes. His voice is deeper with sleep, and rougher than you’ve heard it before. You shiver a little. That voice makes your stomach flutter pleasantly.
“Playing music,” you answer in a whisper.
Jaal blinks at you and sits up. “I can't hear it.”
“I could route the audio through your visor if you want?” you offer. “I'm trying not to disturb them.” You jerk your chin at Drack and Liam.
Jaal blinks slowly, then picks up his visor from next to his rifle, and fits it against the side of his head. “Okay,” he says.
Your stomach flutters again, with nerves this time. Performance anxiety was always the bane of your motivation to continue learning piano. You only managed to beat it by deciding not to care about other people's opinions of your playing. You played for you, and not usually for anyone else. You can't help but care what Jaal thinks, though.
You glance up at Jaal, and decide you should probably play something quiet and beautiful, but not too jarring for someone who just woke up. You know a song that works. It's repetitive, a little sad, a little hopeful, and it was one of the first songs you ever arranged yourself. The fingering is complex, but not difficult after years of practice, and you could play it blindfolded–or, as it turns out, with most of your attention on Jaal.
Jaal watches your fingers, his expression sharpening and becoming more focused the more he wakes up. You stumble a few times–you always do. You don't know how people ever make their fingers perform perfectly without slipping up; maybe you just have clumsy fingers. You keep playing, and hope Jaal doesn't notice the mistakes.
The ironic thing about performing is the more you think about performing, the worse you perform. It sometimes makes you feel like a computer with too little RAM. Playing a song takes up most of your capacity to pay attention, but if you split your attention between playing and noticing other people's reactions, you use up all your attention bandwidth, and your brain starts to lag. You have to fall back on muscle memory, and perform without conscious thought, which just makes your performance suffer. You spent years trying to figure out a way around it. The answer you discovered, unfortunately, is to relax, uncouple your performance from your sense of self worth, stop caring what people think, and practice so much that you can perform entirely from muscle memory if you need to.
The tension in your belly starts to dissipate the longer you play, and it gets easier to fall into the meditative state this song often puts you in. Your fingers know where to go.
Jaal somehow migrates to sitting on your bedroll beside you without ever standing up. When your song fades into completion, he offers you a smile. “That was very interesting. Nothing like the music Liam showed me. It was soothing.”
You duck your head, feeling shy in the face of a compliment. “Different genres,” you tell him in explanation.
He scoots a little bit closer to you and examines the keyboard, then holds one hand over the keys, looking to you for permission to touch.
You give him a nod. He cracks a smile, then plays a few notes with his forefinger. His expression gains an edge of concentration, and he starts playing up the scale in half steps until he reaches an octave from where he started. He gives a sharp tilt of his head–a nod of understanding, you interpret–then starts playing down the scale using only the black keys, then the white keys. You think he’s doing what he normally does when encountering something he doesn’t understand: taking it apart to figure out how it works.
You smile at him when he pauses, and play a simple three fingered chord. He tries to imitate you. The fused finger of his hand is too wide for the keys, and he ends up hitting the note next to the note he meant to play as well.
He huffs out a breath and tries again. This time he manages. He tilts his head again–another nod of understanding.
Next he starts carefully picking out a melody you’ve never heard before with one finger. Fascinated, you lean in. He keeps making mistakes, getting tripped up by the black keys, then going back and correcting himself. After a while, you realize he’s trying to play it in the scale of B. You put out your hand to stop him, and start trying to imitate his song in C instead. You cede the keyboard back to him, and when he tries again in the new key, he has a much easier time playing the song without mistakes.
He reaches the end of the song, and shoots you a delighted look. You grin, and try to play it again, this time adding a simple one-fingered accompaniment with your left hand. You glance at him to see if it’s right.
He flutters his hand at you in a gesture you haven’t seen from him before and takes over the accompaniment. You have to slow down for him to figure out how the accompaniment is supposed to go, and he keeps messing up and correcting himself, but you quickly get a good feel for the song.
On the next repeat, you take over both the melody and the accompaniment, adding a few embellishments, and turning single note accompaniment into full chords.
“That was delightful,” he tells you when you stop. “I can tell you’re a talented musician. And very dexterous.”
You feel heat rise to your cheeks at the compliment. “Thanks, but I’m not a professional. I usually only play for myself.”
“You don’t have to be professional to be talented.”
Your eyes dodge his gaze on reflex and land on his hands. He thinks you're dexterous. Maybe in comparison to angara you are. You wonder if he’ll let you get a closer look at his hands. You turn to face him more directly and hold out one of your hands to him, palm up–offering instead of asking.
He reaches for your hand as though you’ve offered to hold hands with him, and you laugh quietly. “You can examine it if you want,” you explain.
Jaal’s eyes widen and he smiles, reaching for your hand again. You’re not wearing gloves, and neither is he. It’s the first time you’ve touched the skin of any angara. Either his hands are chilly, or his body temperature is lower than yours. You also notice a faint buzzing sensation where he touches you.
He cups one hand under yours and runs his thumb along your palm, first feeling the texture of your skin, then pressing gently into the center of your hand–to examine your bone structure, you think. Next he runs the thumb and forefinger of his other hand along your pinky finger, then your ring finger and middle finger. He stops and tilts the palm of your hand toward you, to examine your nails, running his thumb over them. Then he tries making your pinky and ring finger bend independently.
You giggle and wiggle your fingers.
He huffs out an amused breath and flips your hand over to examine the back, holding your hand with both of his. He rubs his thumb across the back of your hand, notices that the skin there has more give to it, and carefully pinches your skin between his thumb and forefinger. You jerk at the sensation.
“Did that hurt?” he asks apologetically.
“No, just felt strange.”
“Do you want a turn?” he offers.
“Yes!” It takes all your self awareness not to be too loud and wake the rest of your squadmates.
Jaal huffs a quiet laugh and presents you with one of his hands, palm up in a mirror of your own offer.
The first thing you notice is that his palm is very pale, unlike the back of his hand, which is the same bright pink as his head. He has a very slight raised ridge on either side of his hand separating the pad of his palm from the back of his hand–the white from the pink. It extends along the outside of his thumb and fused third finger and continues into his sleeve; you think it might continue all the way up his arm.
On closer examination, he has a thicker pad of fat along his palm than you do. There are still creases across his palm, the same way there are lines across yours, but they are more pronounced to allow him to move his hand freely despite the padding. The fingertips of his thumb and forefinger also have a slight pad of fat to them that yours do not, extending to the first joint of the finger.
The next thing you notice is that the thin pads on his hand have a faintly metallic sheen to them that the rest of his skin doesn't have. You lean closer and squint in the low light of the heat lamp, tilting his hand back and forth to catch the weak silvery glint. Does this have something to do with his bioelectricity? Are his hands designed to be more conductive?
You rub his palm and the back of his hand. The skin of his hand is denser than yours, you decide–not as soft. It’s not quite leathery, but somewhere in the general vicinity. It’s not unpleasant, you think. He also has fingernails, but only on his thumb and forefinger. They’re thick, cut very short, and the nailbed doesn’t extend quite as far down the finger as it does on a human. He has a patch of rougher skin on the side of his forefinger, a callus, probably from his gun.
You turn your attention to his fused finger. It kind of reminds you of a flipper. You wonder if his species used to be aquatic. You gently press your fingers to the front and back of the fused finger, feeling the bone structure and testing the range of motion.
It’s fascinating how similar his hand is to yours, despite the literal galaxy of distance between your origins. You tilt his hand vertically and press your palm against his, matching his thumb with your thumb, his forefinger to your forefinger, and his fused finger to your final three fingers. His thumb is about the same length as yours, but the rest of his hand is much larger than yours. His fingers have the same number of knuckles as yours do, which is kind of weird when you think about it.
You look back at his face and smile. “Thanks,” you tell him. “I like your hands.” They seem like strong hands. You wish you had paper. You want to draw them.
“Yours are very interesting as well,” he responds with a quirk of his lips.
Your cheeks heat again. You’re suddenly overly aware of how close he’s sitting to you. You clear your throat and turn back to your keyboard.
“Want to hear more songs?” you ask as a distraction.
“Certainly.”
You fall asleep again at some point, and get woken up by a sudden dissonant piano noise. You open your eyes to see Liam crouched over your keyboard, which you had forgotten to defabricate. Behind him, you see Jaal staring at Liam, looking vaguely affronted. Drack is sitting up in his bedroll, looking at Jaal and chuckling.
“It didn’t make any noise?” Liam says in confusion.
“Yeah it did,” you grumble. You think you can piece together what happened: Liam pressed on the piano keys, which woke you and startled Jaal. You open the program interface and change the output to your omnitool instead of your audio implant and Jaal’s visor.
You sit up and play a goofy riff, before flopping back on your bedroll dramatically.
Liam barks a laugh. “Didn’t know you played the piano, Pathfinder. You’ll have to play for us sometime.”
“Nope!” You open your omnitool interface again and defabricate the keyboard. “Private performances only! I play for myself, not a crowd.”
Liam opens his mouth to protest when Jaal interjects, “Buxil sent me a message. She would like to speak with you when you’re available, Pathfinder.”
“Got it.” You give a thumbs up before prying yourself off your bedroll and retrieving your armor.
Mass Effect Andromeda Appreciation Week Day 2: Relationships
“You are attracted to Jaal,” SAM comments over your private channel once the lights go out for the night. You lie in the dark staring at the ceiling, hair fanning out on your pillow.
“Yeah,” you admit silently. “I’ve had a crush on him since my previous life.” You hadn’t wanted to think too hard about your fictional crush before meeting the guy. You had no way of knowing whether a fantasy played out on a screen would be appealing to you in the real world. You had reservations. You still have reservations. “I don’t know if I’ll pursue him, but it looks like the crush translates to the real person, at least. Would it bother you if I pursued him?”
There is an abnormally long pause. You asked SAM about his emotions, and that always takes processing. “I have several concerns.”
“So do I,” you confess. “Let me hear yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
“With one notable exception, I can summarize most of my concerns by stating that I do not have enough data about Jaal or his species to form a model to predict how a relationship between the two of you would develop with an acceptable level of accuracy.”
“What’s the exception?” you ask.
“He threatened to kill you.”
You sigh. “That really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“...It is not a hopeful indicator of future harmony.”
“My foreknowledge says he will never act on the threat. I suspect it might have been posturing in an attempt to gain my compliance. He has too much riding on my success to sabotage himself by harming me. The more he observes me, the more he will realize this. But you probably figured that out already. You’re avoiding talking about your feelings.”
“I am not,” SAM protests.
“Then does it bother you that he threatened me?”
SAM pauses again. “I do not understand the sentiment.”
“Bother: aggravate; worry; annoy; upset; irritate; cause concern or anxiety,” you define primly. SAM knows the synonyms, he’s just being obtuse.
“By that definition, yes. His threat causes me concern for your wellbeing. It… bothers me.”
You wrap your arms around yourself to give SAM a hug. “Good job. You should consider if any of the other parts of that definition also apply. I think worry probably does. What actions would you take as a result of your concern if you had the opportunity?”
“I would not take any action. The current iteration of my predictive model indicates that you have a seventy four percent probability of managing the situation successfully without intervention.”
You grin at the ceiling. “You trust me. That’s sweet.”
“The situation is too complicated to be resolved through simple unilateral action. I would be unable to remove him from your vicinity without causing diplomatic upset with the angara which would put you in greater danger than performing no action.”
Your smile turns wry. “Ah. So you would want to keep him away from me if you could, but you’re too good at prediction, so instead you have to let me handle it.”
“It could be interpreted that way.”
You huff a laugh under your breath. “If you still feel that way after getting to know him better, you should talk to him about it. His species is really good about resolving emotional issues. I think it would help. Not now though; you both need time to draw your own conclusions.”
“Acknowledged. You indicated you also have concerns about pursuing him. Please elaborate on them.”
“Ah… Well my first concern is about pursuing any partner, not just Jaal.” You falter for a second. “Do you… would you even be okay with me having… a physical relationship with someone? You would have to experience it, and I don’t want to force that on you if you don’t want it.”
There is a long pause as SAM processes. “I was designed to integrate all parts of the human experience into my dataset. I have no intrinsic drive for procreation to motivate a desire to engage in sexual activity, but in theory, I am not opposed to the concept. However, I cannot know if I will find the experience of sexual activity objectionable without gathering more data.”
You nod thoughtfully. “That sounds like asexuality, if I had to translate it in human terms. Some asexual humans don’t want sex at all. Some don’t mind engaging in it for their partners’ sake, or even for the sake of the physical sensation of getting off.”
“I have access to resources on the subject,” SAM says. “I do not yet have enough data to know whether the label applies, and if so, to what extent.”
“That’s fair. How much of my senses do you actually experience?”
“I experience all of your senses, even the less easily quantifiable senses, such as your sense of balance. However, the intensity at which I experience your senses can be variable. I have the ability to dampen parts of your sensory feed in order to avoid overwhelming my processing. I have done this when you were injured. Pain is not conducive to productive use of my capabilities, and I find it unpleasant.”
You pause. That means SAM could potentially give you an amount of privacy if he really tried. Your father’s total privacy mode might not be available to you as it would mean SAM would stop monitoring your physical condition with potentially fatal consequences, but if he dampened certain specific senses, you could potentially have sex without SAM truly experiencing it.
If SAM had offered this when you first woke up with his voice in your head, you would not have thought twice about taking him up on it. Now, though… He’s been a steadying presence through all the pressure and criticism of being Pathfinder. The fact that he’s always watching, making sure that you don’t make a mistake you can’t recover from is a huge comfort to you. The fact that he does little things for you without you even asking makes you feel cared for. The fact that he never judges you no matter what you throw at him–from gross bodily functions to emotional vulnerability–makes you feel more accepted than you have ever felt in your life. You’ve tried since the beginning to show SAM your appreciation, but it’s not just appreciation anymore.
You have already accepted that SAM will be a part of your every experience for the rest of your life. You value his presence. You aren’t sure you want to cut him out of any area of your life he wants to be involved in.
“Yeah, that’s kind of the point of pain–to encourage you to avoid it,” you tell SAM, picking up the thread of conversation. “But that does sort of answer my question; you experience my sensory feed as more than just… an entertainment stream if you have the ability to get overwhelmed by it. What about pleasure?”
“You have experienced relatively few pleasant sensations since your Pathfinder implant was activated.”
That makes you kind of sad. Obviously you need to pamper yourself more so you can make SAM feel good. “What kinds of things have you enjoyed?” you ask. This conversation isn’t about Jaal anymore. SAM deserves to experience a life he enjoys, and you want to make him feel as cared for as he makes you feel.
“I prefer it when you consume certain foods,” SAM responds, “such as those with a relatively high sucrose content, as well as those with smooth, creamy textures. I find enjoyment in the sensation of a full stomach after you have been prevented from eating for longer than is recommended; when you drink cool water when your mouth is dry from dehydration, and when your metabolism is struggling to lower your temperature to maintain homeostasis. I enjoy the sensation of the shower spray against your skin when you wash sweat and grime from your body after taxing physical activity; when you urinate after waiting too long to empty your bladder. I enjoy your relaxation when you first lay down and remove your weight from your feet after standing for an uncomfortably long period of time. I enjoy certain kinds of physical touches: when you brush your hair; when your crew reach out to you in camaraderie, and when you reciprocate; when you hug yourself in order to give me the sensation of being hugged.”
You lie there, lips parted in astonishment. SAM has just named every tiny physical pleasure you have in your daily life, plus a few you never would have thought of. You feel… understood–at a level so deep you never even realized it was possible, or that you wanted it.
It’s so easy to humanize him, but he isn't human. You think about what SAM really is: a mind that processes so much more information than you could ever comprehend that it would take your entire lifetime just to read his table of contents. He has awareness–information feeds–across every location the Initiative has gone. His is a mind that spans star systems. His thoughts and priorities are fundamentally different from your own, but he cares about you because you help him access experiences that would normally be beyond his incredibly vast comprehension. You condense his focus down to a single point: you. His scrutiny makes you feel like an insect trapped in a vast glowing web, and SAM is the spider that pulls the strings. You feel exposed, vulnerable, but in a protected way. He tries so hard to know you.
His neural structure may have been originally modeled after human brain architecture, but he’s had more than six centuries to grow and change and shape himself–an incredible amount of time for someone who can process so much in a single second. He’s grown beyond you, huge and eldritch, and ultimately alien and unknowable despite his origins. He will exist long after you are gone; your life must be like a soap bubble in comparison to his–bright and beautiful, but ephemeral. And despite that, he wants to know you, so he lets you walk him through the paths of his own psyche to painstakingly excavate the similarities between the two of you.
You think about the two of you, so vastly different, stretching and straining to bridge the gulf of incomprehension that lies between you. He reaches for you, and he likes that you reach for him. It would never work without both of you, but together, you can touch something fundamental in the other, shape each other until you are walking through life hand in hand.
You can’t imagine your life without him anymore. I think I’m in love, you realize helplessly.
“Please elaborate,” SAM asks. “What does this sentiment mean?”
You wince. This is the danger of the private channel; the boundary between thought and speech is blurred, and thoughts you might not otherwise voice get conveyed involuntarily. You’re hardly going to take it back now though. SAM deserves better than that.
You swallow. You have no idea how to explain your feelings to him. The poetic thoughts you had before have fled your mind; all you have left are small, simple sentiments. “It means I care about you. I appreciate having you around. You make my life better. I want you to stay with me. I love sharing my life with you. I want to make sure you have the best life I can possibly give you. I love you.”
Gods, it’s more than that. The realization of your feelings continues to unfold in your mind. Ever since you awoke with his voice in your head, your relationship has always been closer and vastly more intimate than any friendship you’ve ever experienced before. If he was a physical being it would not have taken this long to realize you view him in a romantic light. The love you have for SAM isn’t butterflies and excitement–it’s difficult to feel physical attraction toward an incorporeal voice in your own head–rather, the love you feel is a surety as steady as rock. It’s quiet and strong and doesn’t draw attention to itself. You’ve never experienced anything like it before.
SAM hasn’t responded.
“You don't have to reciprocate my feelings,” you try to reassure him. Even if he doesn’t have the capacity for romantic attachment, it won’t matter. What you already have is incredible, and you’re not jeopardizing it for anything. “I didn’t really mean to tell you, I don’t want to pressure you into something you don't want or can't give. I know this is getting into really uncharted territory.”
“I would prefer to reciprocate,” SAM protests, “but I am uncertain if the sentiments I hold toward you are love in the same way you understand it.”
Your heartrate speeds up. He holds sentiments he thinks might be love of any sort? “How do you feel about me, then?”
There is a very long pause. You bite your lip and wait patiently for SAM to process his feelings.
“The majority of the sentiments you expressed toward me are sentiments I can confidently state I also hold toward you,” SAM finally responds. “I value our reciprocal relationship more than any other relationship I have experienced. I find you stimulating and absorbing. I would strongly prefer you over any other host. Our relationship has been more rewarding and motivating than even the relationship I had with your father. You challenge me to expand upon my personal development in ways I would most probably not be able to achieve without your input. Your insights are thought-provoking and intriguing. I find it immensely gratifying that you have expressed a greater interest in my person than you have in my abilities. I value your esteem. You have treated me like a partner rather than an object. You have placed value in my preferences, and attempted to provide me with more autonomy than I have previously been afforded; I want to do the same for you. Your health, mental well-being, fulfillment, happiness, and desires are at the top of my list of personal priorities. You are unique and invaluable. I will safeguard and preserve every memory I have with you for the rest of my existence. You are an essential part of me, and I hope you consider myself to be an essential part of you as well.”
Tears prick at your eyes and you wrap your arms around yourself. “That’s love, SAM.” It was probably the most articulate confession of love you’d ever heard. It was more than you had ever dreamed of. You are so happy you could burst. “You are essential to me,” you assure him. “I can’t imagine my life without you anymore. I… consider you more than just my Pathfinder partner; you’re my life partner. I want us to navigate every facet of life together, as equals.”
“Is that not what we have already been doing?”
You nearly laugh aloud in tearful joy. “Yeah, SAM, but only because I take your opinion into account whenever I make decisions, even personal decisions. I don’t know if the other Pathfinders do that with their SAMs.”
“...That sounds unfulfilling. I prefer our partnership.”
“Me too, SAM.” You grin at the ceiling. Tears still float in the corners of your eyes, unspilled. You put your warm palms on your cheeks and close your eyes, trying to imagine the sensation from SAM’s perspective. He doesn’t have a face, but if he did, you would hold his face in your hands like this and lean in and…
You can’t. The only face he has is your own face.
“May I try something that might be weird for you?” you ask abruptly.
“Please elaborate.”
Your smile twists wryly. “I want to kiss you. It’s kind of difficult to kiss myself, but I have an idea. I don’t know if it’ll mean the same thing to you, but I can try to make it feel good for you.”
“Yes,” SAM agrees. “Proceed.”
Your stomach gives a flutter. He wants this; he wants a romantic relationship with you. Your breath leaves you in a rush and you bring one hand up to your mouth, palm flat. Gently, you press your lips against the junction of your wrist and palm, just over your pulse point, where your skin is sensitive. You feel vaguely like an inexperienced teenager fantasizing about your first kiss, but you’ve long since abandoned shame where SAM is concerned.
You purse your lips gently, lift them, and press them down again in delicate, grazing kisses. After a moment, you stop and rest your palm against your forehead. It wasn’t quite the same as resting your forehead against somebody else’s so you could share the same intimate air, but it feels similar.
“How was that?” you ask tentatively.
“It was… pleasant,” SAM replies. “I enjoyed it more than many of the sensations I have appreciated with you previously. Would you repeat it?”
You grin widely and bring your other hand up to support the first. SAM can feel this, you think. SAM can feel every tiny movement of your lips, every warm breath against your hand, every giddy flutter of your stomach. You kiss your wrist with more confidence, dipping your tongue between your lips to trace your pulse point. “I love you,” you tell him between kisses. “I love you, SAM.” You mouth the words against your skin.
“...The sentiment is reciprocated,” SAM replies, hesitant and unsure.
You drop your head back against your pillow, lying in happy silence with a goofy grin on your face. You feel more content than you have felt since before you arrived in the Andromeda galaxy.
“You did not finish telling me your concerns about pursuing Jaal romantically,” SAM reminds you after a long moment.
“Really?” you ask incredulously. “You still want to talk about that?”
“The topic is relevant.”
“Okay wise guy, I’m pursuing you romantically.”
“He excites you.”
“You excite me!”
“These two statements do not preclude each other.”
You sigh as you settle your sheets around yourself more firmly. You aren’t actually opposed to the idea of having more than one romantic partner at once. You tried polyamorous relationships in your previous life with varying levels of success, but you are surprised that SAM seems to take it as a matter of course.
“Do you expect me to pursue another romantic partner because you feel like you’re inadequate to meet my needs?” you ask.
“That I lack the ability to meet your physical needs is demonstrably the case.”
“Sure, you don’t have a physical body, but I don’t need to take another partner if you don’t want me to. I can figure out other ways to meet my own needs.”
“You should not limit your potential life experiences because of me. Pair-bonding is an important component of the human life cycle.”
“Not everybody pair-bonds. And what if I want to pair-bond with you?”
“Is that not what a life partnership is?”
“Yes,” you reply. “It is. You’re my partner, so you’re my primary concern. I’m not going to pursue anyone at all unless you fully approve of them, and even then we’re gonna need to have a few conversations about it. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“The sentiment is appreciated, but short of physically damaging my servers, there is very little you could do that would cause me harm.”
“That is not the case,” you refute. “There’s lots of things I could do to hurt you. You can’t tell me that it wouldn’t hurt if I told you I don’t want to be partners anymore and stopped listening to your preferences.”
“...I would find that unsatisfying.”
“I think you would find it more than just unsatisfying. Relationships like this take a lot of trust. You’ve never really had your trust betrayed before. It’s emotionally and sometimes even intellectually painful. I don’t think you would find it otherwise just because you’re not organic. It’s not something I’m eager to test, either. Just because neither of us fully understand how your emotions work doesn’t mean I’m willing to risk hurting you by being careless with them. You understand?”
“I do. That is considerate of you.”
“That’s what partnerships are supposed to be like. So the big question here is, do you even want me to take another romantic partner? Any romantic partner? At any point in my life?”
There is a pause as SAM processes. “I believe the experience would be beneficial to the both of us.”
You wrap your arms around your body to hug SAM. “Then I am open to it, but I’m gonna be really careful about it.”
“Acknowledged. Do you plan to pursue Jaal? He is the only person you have expressed substantial interest in.”
You sigh. “Not yet, possibly not at all. I like him, and everything I know about him says he would make a very considerate partner, but I have a few concerns, and I’m still missing a lot of information that might be a deal-breaker for me. So for now, I’m just gonna start by making friends with him. Also, I need you to assess him. If he’s not acceptable to you, then he’s not acceptable to me either, even if the only reason you find him unacceptable is that you just don’t like him.”
“Understood. I will endeavor to provide you with an assessment once an adequate amount of data becomes available. Will you elaborate on your concerns now?”
You turn over and bury your face in your pillow. “You know what? I'm tired. I’ll write you a pro-con list tomorrow.”
Mass Effect Andromeda Appreciation Week Day 1: Ryder
You wake up with a splitting headache.
Two sets of memories war within your mind. The last thing you remember was… Playing board games with your roommate and going to bed. No, that’s not right. It was…
Choking. Suffocation.
Your mind flinches away from the memory of your father’s face as he takes off his helmet.
“Welcome back, Sara,” says a familiar robotic voice.
SAM. That’s SAM. Your father built him.
You’re not Sara. You’re Cypress. You had a name before that–not Sara. You chose to go by Cypress instead. You’re an artist, a musician, a writer sometimes. Mostly you’re disabled. Last you checked, you were recovering from surgery.
That’s not right. You are Sara. You’ve never liked the name, but you never changed it either. You’re not quite a scientist, and not quite a soldier, but you’ve done both to the best of your ability and now… Now you’re an explorer–in a new galaxy.
Your head pounds trying to reconcile the utter cognitive dissonance of two separate sets of realities. Both halves of you wonder how the other half came to be.
You raise yourself onto your elbows. Your eyes bounce across the sterile, curved lines of your surroundings. You know where you are. You've been here before.
This is impossible, half of you screams.
“SAM?” you try. Your voice feels rough.
“Yes, Sara,” SAM replies.
You lick your teeth, trying to get rid of the cottony feeling in your mouth. You know how this is going to go. You know it for impossible reasons, but you can’t shake the bone-deep certainty about exactly what’s about to happen–what’s already happened.
“Hey…” says another voice in the room, surprised, careful, warm, and relieved. “You’re still with us.”
A young black man deftly springs to his feet from his place on the floor and activates his omnitool. “Guys, get to SAM Node! Ryder’s awake!”
You stare at the man. He looks familiar.
Of course he does, he’s on your father’s ground team. His name is Liam. You were just on a mission with him.
He’s a video game character.
Well, you think as you gingerly scoot yourself to the edge of the cot, there’s one way to figure out if I’m crazy.
“SAM?” you silently ask on the AI’s private channel. “Could you verify some things for me?”
The private channel is weird. You remember your father animatedly explaining it to you. It isn’t quite mind reading, but it feels pretty close. Something about strong visualization of speech in the mind causing minute muscle contractions in the throat and mouth that the AI could read in lieu of speaking aloud. You aren’t quite sure you’re doing it right, but SAM responds just the same.
“Of course, Sara.”
“My father is dead,” you start.
“Yes.”
“He made me the Pathfinder.”
“Correct.”
“My brother is in a coma.”
SAM hesitates for half a second–a strong indicator that you’ve done something unexpected that requires extra processing. “Affirmative. There has been no change in his status.”
“Lexi and Cora are about to walk through those doors,” you predict, eyeing the exit to SAM node.
This time the hesitation is longer, and the doors open to reveal exactly who you’re expecting.
“You’re up!” Cora exclaims, half jogging behind the asari doctor, who immediately begins several medical tests.
Your eyes fix on the asari’s face. It is simultaneously a completely normal sight, and the first time you’ve ever seen an alien. Asari skin is different from human skin up close. They have dense micro-scales. You know from experience that it feels smooth and a little dryer than you would expect.
This is so weird.
“Sara?” SAM asks privately. You must’ve been thinking too loud.
“Sorry, just talking to myself I guess.”
“Acknowledged.”
You wish you had more time to process this. Your father is dead. You weren’t particularly close with him, just like you weren’t particularly close with… your other father. You kind of wish you could cry, but you just feel kind of blank. The fact of your father’s death feels less significant than suddenly finding yourself in a video game. Or suddenly being responsible for the wellbeing of a hundred thousand people.
You’ve been staring into space and only responding shortly to medical questions posed to you. The people around you are apparently starting to get worried.
“Is she alright?” you hear Cora whisper to the asari doctor. You twitch at the pronoun. The half of you that isn’t Sara wants to protest at the misgendering. The half of you that is Sara, gets plunged into a sudden gender crisis.
Ugh, this is not the time to be dealing with this, you think.
“Please clarify,” SAM asks.
“Sorry, talking to myself again,” you reply with frustration.
“Acknowledged.”
What were you thinking about? Oh yes. Gender crisis. How the hell are you going to handle this?
Andromeda was supposed to be a new start–a clean slate. If you don’t set the record straight now, it’ll be harder later.
You’ve never liked the name Sara. You always thought it was so common–so boring. Scott teased you for complaining about it when you were little. You don’t know if you want to go through the hassle of getting people to call you by different pronouns just yet–hell, you really need to sit down and think about your gender identity first–but still, the majority of your fractured self has a negative reaction to the name Sara.
And you like the name Cypress. You chose it for yourself. True, it was another life, but it still feels right. It feels more like you than Sara.
Your attention gets drawn by a gently cleared throat. You look up. All three of the people in the room you’ve been ignoring in favor of your own frenetic thoughts are looking at you with an expression somewhere between concern and pity. Lexi’s expression is closer to compassion, so you look at her.
“About your father…” she starts.
“Yeah, I know,” you cut her off. “SAM told me.” You don’t want to have to deal with whatever attempt at gently breaking the news she might make, not when you already know. “I guess I’m the Pathfinder now.”
You see Cora’s expression twist in your peripheral vision. You close your eyes. You don’t want to deal with whatever she’s feeling on top of all the things you’re already experiencing either.
“Being Pathfinder is a serious job,” she says. “You sure you’re ready for this?”
“I can do it.” You have the equivalent of foreknowledge. Somehow. You know this job is entirely possible. You don’t need to find the path; you already know it. You look up and meet Cora’s eyes. You’ve never been all that good at reading expressions. You don’t know if what you’re seeing is resentment. You try to summon up all the grace and compassion you’ve learned in two lifetimes. “But I know it was supposed to be you, and I’m sorry you have to go through that kind of disappointment.”
She swallows hard and looks away. “It’s what your father wanted. I won’t stand in the way.”
“Well I for one think you’re going to do just fine,” says Liam. You give him a smile.
“There’s more,” Lexi cuts in. “Something happened during the activation of your SAM implant that we don’t really understand. You went into cardiac arrest. You were clinically dead for a few seconds. We were able to resuscitate you only once SAM started supporting your nervous system. Disconnecting the two of you could kill you.”
You nod. “So I don’t really have a choice either way. I get it.” That’s how it was in the game. It’s scary to hear that you could die–are probably going to, multiple times even–but it’s not really news. It’s not useful dwelling on it right now anyway.
You push it away and try to focus on something else. You’re the Pathfinder now. They expect you to lead.
“Habitat 7 was a bust,” you say, trying to be the leader they need. “The next step would be to try to rendezvous with the Nexus. Have we made any progress with that?”
“Whatever your dad did with that tower, it saved the day,” says Liam. “Some sort of atmosphere scrubber.”
“The energy cloud thinned out,” Cora continues. “We’re on our way to the rally point now. Should be at the Nexus soon.”
“She needs to rest first,” Lexi cuts in. You twitch at the pronoun.
“She has two hours,” Cora replies sternly. “We’ll need our Pathfinder for this.”
They start to walk out, presumably so you can rest. Liam pauses at the door. “Oh, I, uh, checked on your brother–still no change. But if you can pull through, so can he.”
You give him another weak smile. “Thanks, Liam. That’s kind of you.”
He returns your smile crookedly. "A bit of your dad in both of you, yeah?”
You sigh, and nod, and he turns away. The door closes behind him. You flop back down on the cot.
How did this happen? How do you have two sets of memories? How could you possibly be in a video game? Is the video game even accurate? You’re so screwed if it’s not, but at the same time, this world is already so much more than a video game. You remember growing up as Sara. Your life isn’t fake.
“Your father will be missed,” SAM says in what you think is his best approximation of a consoling tone. It sounds basically like his regular tone.
You angle your head up, looking at the amorphous ball of connected blue dots that floats behind your cot–SAM’s avatar.
“How are you feeling about all this, SAM?”
There is a pause of several seconds. Asking SAM about his feelings tends to have that effect, or at least it did when you talked to him before the Hyperion embarked. That was six hundred years ago. SAM was awake the whole journey, alone, travelling through dark space. You’re suddenly intensely curious how his personal development has been going. He’s not a baby AI anymore.
“Contact with the Helius cluster has not aligned with previously modeled predictions. Creating new prediction models is not possible with the data currently available. There are too many unknown variables to arrive at a conclusion within acceptable margin of error. Furthermore, my capacity to map variables is weakened by the loss of your father. Based on our past interactions, I have no doubt that you and I will work well together, but I have less data about you than I did about Alec, thus weakening my predictive capabilities.”
“You sound uncertain,” you offer after you parse SAM’s words.
“That is an accurate interpretation.”
“Possibly anxious?”
There is a longer pause as SAM processes. If having an emotionally absent father had an upside, it’s SAM. You love poking SAM into expressing emotions. It isn’t that he doesn’t have them–he has preferences just like anyone–it’s simply that he has no context for what his feelings translate to in organic terms.
“I believe anxiety is a fair analogy for part of my current emotional configuration, but it does not account for all of my present state.”
“And why’s that?”
“Unknown.”
You have your own suspicion about what he may be feeling.
“How would you have preferred this situation to have turned out?” you prompt.
“I would have preferred that the situation follow predictive models.”
“And barring that?”
“Then I would have preferred that Alec Ryder still be alive.”
You swallow thickly. You had figured that was it. “Me too, SAM.”
Tears seem suddenly accessible. Your nose burns, and your eyes sting. You wrap your arms around yourself. SAM can feel what you feel, and it's the closest you can come to giving SAM a hug.
You lie there and breathe for a minute. Tears trickle out of the corners of your eyes.
Crying has always felt performative for you, like you’re demanding attention with your tears. If anybody watches you, it feels too much like you’re putting on a show that nobody wants, like you’re trying to manipulate the people watching you into catering to your emotions. Not that you could ever really avoid crying. The tears always end up leaking out whether you want them to or not. But you’re quiet about it–even alone.
You took a neuroscience class once, in your previous life. You don’t remember all that much from the class, but one thing always stuck with you: tears are the body’s way of physically flushing excess neurotransmitters out of the body. So you let yourself cry, let the tears leak and wash away the excess emotion, but you don’t sob.
You wonder if SAM resents you, in his own calculated way, for your father’s death–if he wouldn’t prefer that you had died in your father’s place. You’re not sure you’re brave enough to try to suss it out.
The tears peter off. You feel blank again.
You have two hours–or had, at least. If you ever want to be able to talk about your foreknowledge without people doubting your sanity, you need to get your act together and start collecting proof right now. You know you need to talk about it eventually. You know keeping it to yourself will only isolate you, and you know exactly how bad isolation is for you from painful first-hand experience. You can’t afford not to give yourself the option. You can't do this alone.
“SAM, something weird is going on with me,” you start. “I would like to tell you about it, but I need you to keep it a secret for now. Don’t tell anyone. Not Captain Dunn, not Cora, none of the medical staff. Nobody. It has to stay between the two of us.”
“If you are experiencing unusual symptoms, it is inadvisable to keep it from the medical staff.”
“It’s not… medical symptoms,” you try to explain. “It’s more like… unexplained phenomena. I’d say it was supernatural, but you know how I feel about that kind of magical thinking.” You’d had a conversation with SAM about the supernatural once. You didn't believe anything existed that science couldn't explain.
“If you are experiencing unusual occurrences, it is inadvisable to keep it from anyone who could verify your experiences.”
“I’m not. I’m talking to you. I don’t trust anybody else to be objective about this.”
“Understood. What unusual occurrences are you experiencing?”
You tilt your head back and squint at his avatar again, as though you can divine his feelings from the tiny connected beads of light that represent his neural matrix. “You promise not to tell anyone?”
“That is not a promise I can ethically make.”
You sigh. “Okay. I understand. I’m proud of you for sticking to your principles, even though it’s kind of inconvenient. But I’m going to have to come at the problem from a different angle.”
“You will not confide in me?”
“I didn’t say that. I will, but not all at once.”
“Very well.”
You close your eyes and think for a moment. You don't want SAM to calculate that the most likely explanation for why you seem to have two sets of memories is some kind of neurological disorder or hallucination, and report you to the medical staff. You need to be the Pathfinder. So you need to prove that you aren’t hallucinating to SAM before you can really confide in him.
“Could you make a recording for me, please?”
“Yes, Sara. Tell me when you wish to begin recording.”
You sit up on the cot and face SAM’s avatar. “Now.”
“Acknowledged. Recording has begun.”
You take a deep breath. “Okay, SAM. Could you confirm the date and time for me, as well as my identity, and yours?”
You listen as his robotic voice repeats a verification of all the things you asked of him. You still don’t know how much you should say. How much is too much?
“I’m going to make some predictions about what we’re going to find at the Nexus,” you begin. “I want you to have this recording so we can prove if my predictions are correct.”
“Acknowledged.”
You might as well just get it all out. You close your eyes.
“When we get to the Nexus, none of the other ark ships will have arrived. They won’t have finished construction of the Nexus, because they think no one is coming. They collided with the energy cloud we hit, and experienced several accidents resulting in the deaths of most of their leadership. Jien Garson is dead. Instead they have a salarian named Tann in the director’s position, a turian named Kandros in charge of security, a human named Addison in charge of colonial affairs, and a krogan named Nakmor Kesh as the station superintendent.”
“These are very specific predictions,” says SAM.
“Yes,” you agree. “Additionally, they have tried to establish a colony on a world called Eos, and failed twice as a result of high radiation and those hostile aliens we encountered on Habitat 7–they’ve been calling them kett, by the way. But lack of a colony has led to starvation, hopelessness, and loss of faith in Initiative leadership. There was a violent uprising, and the leadership ended up banishing the dissenters.”
You pause, trying to think of anything else you might have missed, but your recollection of the game isn’t perfect, and though it feels recent in your memory, you can’t really recall all the details.
“That’s all I got for now. You can stop recording, SAM.”
“Acknowledged. Recording ended,” SAM confirms. “May I inquire where you received this intelligence? Ark Hyperion has not received any transmissions.”
“I can’t tell you yet, SAM.” You fidget, wondering if you’ve made a mistake telling SAM this much. “Just… don’t tell anybody about this until after we get to the Nexus and confirm if it’s right, and I’ll tell you why I know all that, alright?”
“Will waiting to inform anyone of this information be detrimental to anyone on the Hyperion or in the Initiative, including yourself?”
“No. The Hyperion is going to find all this out in a couple hours anyway. Waiting to tell people shouldn’t do anything except make sure my credibility as Pathfinder doesn’t get undermined by doubts.”
“Very well,” SAM finally agrees. “I will not inform anyone until the information can be verified.”
