#biotic meta

[swaps55]

SWAPS!!!! THE NEW CHAPTER!!!!! I'M SCREAMING!!!!! MEZZO MY BELOVED, SAM MY BELOVED. thank you SO MUCH for keeping us fed. I had a quick question about Sam's biotics in the chapter (Side note, but your exploration of biotics in all your fics is so unique and I ADORE IT). I understand that the thorian cipher changed the way his biotics worked by allowing two simultaneous fields instead of distortion, and Miranda notes that Lazarus couldn't have created this distortion---only recreated it. Kaidan's reaction on Horizon was partially due to his shock over Shepard's different biotic field, but Kaidan was present before and after Feros. Why didn't he notice Shepard's biotic field change in the ME1 era? Or did the biotic field change only occur after Shepard's reconstruction, as he had to relearn biotics?

Again, I loved the chapter! This is my fav fic and series EVER, and I look forward to the next update :)

THANK YOU!! I have been chewing my fist off to get this chapter out there. I have been so excited about it.

Now, before I dive into this. Remember that there is a lot of fiction in this science. We don't know what it feels like to manipulate gravity or create mass effect fields or how dark energy works. So I take a lot of liberties and have a great time, lol.

To answer your question - the biotic "fingerprint" that Kaidan recognizes is not anything Sam does with the gravity well or how he uses it - it's the sensation created merely by his existence within it. This is different from Sam actively engaging with the gravity well to create mass effect fields, which has also been changed, but by the thorian, and not Miranda. And I think that would be harder to spot.

In Opus, that 'sixth sense' tells biotics when another biotic is passively in their vicinity, and for each biotic, that sensation is unique. Biotic implants make that fingerprint stronger, and influence how it "feels."

I do imagine the distinctions are subtle, and really only stand out when you know someone really well. If you walked into a room with two biotics you had never met, you would know there were two distinct fields, but if you ran into them again later, you likely wouldn't clock, "hey that's the asari who served my coffee yesterday!" unless there was something very, very distinct about it.

But Kaidan knows Sam's field very, very intimately. Even without language to describe it, he would - and does - immediately recognize that it's wrong after Lazarus.

Before Lazarus, I don't think humans had any reason to make the distinction that the implant influenced that field significantly enough to alter it, because replacing an implant is so rare. So the assumption that biotics feel unique in the gravity well didn't have a documented connection to the implant.

Now, how is all this different from the way Sam generates biotic fields?

What the thorian did through the cipher was change enough of Sam's brain chemistry that he no longer creates fields like other humans, or even like every other alien race in this cycle. He now creates mass effect fields like the protheans did.

In Opus, most species biotics work through displacement. They create a field in their hand, then send it where they want it to go. There is, in essence "travel time" between the field being created and it reaching its target. But gravity moves at the speed of light, making that "travel time" happen so quickly it's not really visible to the organic eye - and that's the key.

Because what Sam does post-thorian cipher is create fields through superpositioning - when he generates a field it exists in two places at once, his hand, and at the target. When the waveform collapses, the field now only exists at the target.

It's possible this feels a little weird to him, and possible it feels a little weird to someone like Kaidan, who is so in tune with Shepard's biotics. But it wouldn't trigger the same wrongness that the implant change did.

Now, why does charge feel so weird and unsettling to Sam and anyone near him when he does it? Because charge is going to take the superpositioning one step further, which we'll get to soon. Charge is not something he would have been capable of before the implant upgrade. Because 1) it would have been beyond the limitations of his previous implant. 2) He wasn't fucked up enough yet to be that stupid.

Hopefully some, any, of that makes even a lick of sense. It is science fiction after all, lol.

[swaps55]

I'm not sure how many biotic OCS you have but how did they all get their amps?

Sam Shepard is my only true biotic OC, unless you count Kaidan, who sort of falls into that grey area of an established canon character that I have a great deal of headcanon for.

My take is that unlike implants, which are the hard-wired "junction box" to the biotic's nervous system that are more or less permanent once surgically installed, amps are easy to remove and replace, and therefore upgrade as needed. I see them as very expensive pieces of equipment that require a lot of calibration to play nicely with the wearer's specific brain chemistry. Between high costs and all the fiddling involved, upgrading is not a frequent thing. A biotic gets very comfortable and familiar with their amp. When a new one is procured, it would need a lot of customization, fine tuning, etc. before you'd get optimal performance. The more you use it, the better you'd get with it. You wouldn't, for example, pick up a new amp before walking into a firefight. It would be a little like going out hiking in a pair of brand new shoes.

Sam was fitted with his implant on Ares Station, an Alliance outpost in the Kuiper belt of the Sol system dedicated to N training, and for a while, an experimental program designed to train kids with both high biotic and command potential. Sam was one of a small group of teenagers put into the program. That's where he would have gotten his "training wheels" amp as he learned how to be a biotic. Upon leaving the program I'm sure he was fitted with a more robust amp. As one of the earlier biotics, I imagine the technology for human amps changed too fast to keep up in the first decade, meaning Sam has probably upgraded his amp more than most newer biotics.

I headcanon there is no biotic component to the N program when Sam goes through it. He's the first biotic to pass N1, first to reach N7, so when it comes to spec-ops level biotic equipment, the Alliance works with him to determine what he needs rather than provide one based on Alliance specifications - because there are no Alliance specifications yet. He probably got to have a lot of input on what he uses now.

It's a fun thought exercise to think about who develops better amps for humans. Serrice Council, an asari corporation, is the top-tier amp manufacturer in ME1. It's not a stretch to think they they tapped the human market early because they already had the knowledge of how to design a damn good amp - it was just a matter of adapting it to human physiology. But eventually, human biotech companies would start to catch up and eventually overtake Serrice Council. Human amp design would be a much smaller market share than asari, and overall of less interest once the competition got hotter. Likewise, human corporations would have very little chance of breaking into the asari market at all, keeping them laser-focused on human amp design.

Sam has a new, Cerberus-designed amp when he wakes up after Lazarus, and he is not happy about it. Not because it sucks - it's better than what he had - but because no one got his consent (admittedly tough to do when you're dead), and he was forced to adapt to it and a new implant at the same time.

[swaps55]

I find your biotic headcanons fascinating and super cool, but I can't get my head around the connection between the gravity well (like Sam's always sticking a finger in) and the actual "doing" of stuff with dark energy. Any chance I could convince you to elaborate? :)

Thank you! This is a fun one.

See, the thing with dark energy is that we don't actually really know what it is. We're just pretty sure that it exists. Just like we understand how gravity behaves, but we don't really know what causes it (a study actually just came out about the relationship between gravity and mass that I am excited to look into). Which is why when it comes to Mass Effect, you kind of have to let go of the science and lean into the fiction.

What Sam does with the gravity well is just mass manipulation. Mass Effect 1 biotic skills like lift and throw and warp are all predicated on the simple idea that biotics manipulate mass. It's the rule of science that the Mass Effect universe breaks: the law of conservation of mass states that mass cannot be created or destroyed, and the Mass Effect basically says, "but in this universe it can be."

In Mass Effect 2/3, the mass part of it gets thrown out the window a little in favor of powers like Reave, Nova, etc., in which the actual destructive element seems to be dark energy itself, rather than mass manipulation. I am trying to avoid that, because I want to stick with the harder science of the mass effect, which is why if we actually see any of those abilities in Opus, they'll be framed a little differently.

So when Sam interacts with the gravity well to do stuff, it's some variation of adding or reducing the mass of an object (in the case of a warp field it's both at the same time), and dark energy is the mechanism for mass alteration. How does that work, exactly? Well, since we don't know because you can't actually create or destroy mass, the fiction part in Opus is that dark energy is more or less the means of communication between the gravity well and the eezo nodes in the nervous system.

In the case of the toying Sam does, it's a fictionalized interpretation of what it would feel like to have that connection to the gravity well literally be embedded in your nervous system. We don't have any way to know what it feels like, so I made up something that would offer them their own secret sixth sense and and pseudo private comm channel. :)

[swaps55]

So I was reading through your biotics tag because I ran across one of your biotics headcanon posts and just went 'YES I need more!' And I saw you mention Reave not being canon in Opus, and apparently I completely forgot about the healing/damage protection effects because I was imagining it as just a weird more difficult but in some situations better variation of Warp this whole time?

What I was thinking was that Reave does basically what Warp does, but it's a) more targeted at specific weak points, which is why it causes more damage to armor and barriers than Warp, and b) it lasts over a period of time rather than being instant, giving the brief stunning effect it has when used on organics because pain, but that means it requires focus/effort for that time period. Both of which would make it more difficult than Warp to learn, and the precision part would require a biotic to either know or be able to correctly guess what to target, which would add additional difficulty to using it effectively.

I also discovered by reading your headcanons that apparently I have a surprising amount of thoughts on some of the topics in question that I've come up with at some point while thinking about some facet of biotics, and I might write some of those down and post later maybe.

I love hearing other biotic headcanons! I think reave being a variation of warp is great - it definitely lends itself to shearing fields, and definitely agreed that whatever reave is, it probably requires a great deal of skill to achieve. I did come up with a unique scenario in which reave could technically exist in Opus, but it's under very specific circumstances, and not really...repeatable. But it does function like a spinoff of warp.

Which also begs a question I ask myself a lot when it comes to biotics: if it's really difficult, why do it, if there's a simpler solution? In my world, biotics are taxing and resource intensive, so you want to make sure you're getting the right return on investment when using them. Though, sometimes the answer for why you do it even if its working harder not smarter is just, "because it's fucking cool." XD Either way, the thought exercise is always fun.

I try not to think about biotics in terms of "damage," because damage is a game mechanic. In reality, people don't have health bars or take damage the way they do in a game, and likewise, the way biotics interact with armor, kinetic shielding, and other biotic barriers is going to be more complex than doing damage to an armor bar. If you're writing it from a harder science perspective, anyway, which no one has to do. Asking "so what actually happens when a biotic uses a shearing mass effect field on a kinetically shielded target?" is, again, a neat thought exercise, and because the mass effect breaks the rules of physics to begin with, there isn't a Single Correct Answer.

The kaleidoscope of world building ideas people come up with when we're all ultimately playing in the same sandbox is one of my favorite things about fandom.

I hope you do write your ideas down!