Holist shut the door behind him, making sure it was tightly closed, then sliding home three deadbolts into the steel frame he'd had installed. Better safe than sorry, and he was certain that it could hold against... well, against anything trying to get through. He hoped. He sighed, setting his aircar keys down on a table next to the entry way, then sliding down the door to the ground. He put his hands on his knees, staring deeper into his apartment.

It was dark in here, primarily because of the blackout curtains he'd installed himself over every window. Blackout curtains impenetrable to every wave on the electromagnetic spectrum. He'd selected this apartment in particular because of the large amount of metal and concrete in its structure creating a blocking effect, and now it was complete. Nothing and nobody could look into his apartment without his knowing. Even the locks were all mechanical, things he'd had to have custom-printed because nobody did mechanical locks anymore. Nobody but, well... conspiracy theorists, he supposed. Apocalypse people, though there weren't so many of them these days. There'd probably be a resurgence, though, for the same reason he'd bought the locks.

With a grunt, he forced himself back to his feet, flipping a switch and wincing as lights came on throughout his home. He slid the bag off his shoulder, sliding his omnitool into one of the pockets, then storing the entire thing in an old, busted food reheater, a cheap, though effective, electromagnetic isolation chamber of sorts. The only thing technological that he kept was a small storage drive, which he withdrew from a pocket while double checking that the reheater had sealed correctly. He'd removed any sort of wireless capability from the PC that he did his real work on, but it never paid to be sloppy. Speaking of which... he opened the single drawer in the table besides the door, staring at the inside. He reached in, gently pushing aside the pistol to retrieve the bug sweeper, closing the drawer again with a hand, while the other waved the sweeper over every part of himself and his clothing.

Clean, as always. He sagged in relief, then straightened again, adjusting the settings on it for wider sweeping and going over the entryway carefully. Nothing. The same went for the kitchen, with its small cooler and smaller table, with one chair. His bedroom was clean, and he went over the single mattress twice: one over, one under. The cramped little bathroom was clean as well. And, finally... his work room. This was where his salary went, the money poured into computer equipment and every failsafe and isolation device that he could think of. The place was sealed, nothing in or out, absolutely no communications except for a single internet line, the only one of its kind, that went into one of the two machines. The simpler and cheaper of the two, the first machine only had enough resources to visit webpages and such- and even then, he barely used the little thing. Any connection to the outside, even this little hardwire, was a flaw in his home. He shuddered a little as he passed it over, moving to the second machine.

Now, this... this was where the expensive stuff went. This machine's purpose was to do everything and anything he needed, processing data and using a VI program that he had painstakingly crafted himself entirely for his own purposes. The VI had never reached beyond the four walls of the room that it had been born in, had never even been connected to the internet, and its entire day was spent idle or shifting through the loads of data that he fed it on a daily basis. His grip tightened around the little drive he was holding, and he hesitated a moment, before pushing it into a slot in the machine's tower.

Every single day, Holist went into work, and while he worked constructing cutting edge VI's for corporate use and acting cheerful in view of cameras, a little box of a machine he'd built downloaded any information matching premade requirements and saved it to a fresh drive that he purchased. Every single day, he'd take the full drive, bring it home, and feed it to the VI... then add it to the piles of drives here in this room, neatly organized and labelled with dates and sometimes even events in his precise lettering. Drawer after drawer of them, going back months, even years, though the longer back in the past the more infrequent the data got. Once upon a time, he'd been satisfied with a drive a month, higher filter standards and not much information meaning that the same size of drive lasted longer. These days, though... these days he went through a drive every single day. They were smaller, ordered in bulk and ostensibly for his company work, but he still had one for every single day ever since the seven-second shutdown. That's what they called it on the deeper parts of the extranet, the places he frequented occasionally- though never added to. He wasn't that stupid.

The seven-second shutdown, Geth platforms all over the world freezing in place for seven whole seconds as the name implied, had sent waves through the conspiracy scene. So many were far more careful than they'd ever been before, and regular users that had online presences had dropped off the radar entirely. Holist himself had never really been highly involved in such scenes, but after the SSS? He kept his involvement only to going over logs from his little box after the fact. He'd done everything he possibly could to keep his name away from everything, to lock it all down.

The holoscreen attached to his second machine came on, displaying a blue-lighted grid of lines, the representation of the VI he'd made.

"Greetings, user. Reviewing and sorting information for today."

"Estimated time, Auntie?"

He dropped into the office chair set in front of his computer desk, sighing as the springs in the thing creaked quietly. It'd been... a long day. They'd all been long days, ever since the triple S.

"Thirty two minutes. Constructing timeline, and preparing to display most relevant logged data."

"Good."

He leaned back, staring at the ceiling. He couldn't let this go, never, not until he'd had the answers he needed. He didn't know if he'd like the answers he found, or if all his worst fears were realized... but he had to try.

He had to.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT​

I checked the little box again, and found that the drive had been removed.

It'd been something I'd noticed early on. A little machine, just enough processing power to support an extremely basic search program that trolled the extranet, particularly the parts devoted to Rannoch and its star system, for a whole list of things. Keywords, phrases, patterns, all things that seemed to more or less fit the bill for what I thought of as a ME AI. So, then, someone had been searching for anything that might hint at... well, not specifically me as ME AI's technically worked differently from how I was, but something close. It'd been something I'd noted a while back, though I hadn't really paid much conscious attention to it- even now, I was just devoting a small fraction of my runtime to investigating the little machine.

What was strange about it was the iron defenses it was wrapped in. It appeared that approximately half the machine's resources had been devoted just to defensive programs and programming, which was exceedingly abnormal at the very least. What was even more odd was that none of the programs themselves really resembled any sort of official branded software, and nearly all of it appeared to have been custom written specifically for this machine by whoever owned it. I would have just tossed it out as some sort of weird hobby, or just a random crackpot's thing, but... the drives.

The security on the little box, which would be hellishly difficult to crack for the typical Quarian hacker, were like curtains to me. I passed through them easily, and thus I could watch the program as it worked, and monitor what went on inside the machine. And while that was interesting, given that the data the box was programmed to search for were all the sort of patterns I would imagine AI's would leave, what really caught my attention was the drive that was inserted into it. Every single day, with almost religious regularity, the drive would be pulled and swapped with a completely blank new drive. The time was always different, and the person who did it was in and out in a bare couple of seconds, but every single day the full drive would be removed and a fresh drive would be inserted. I'd left little software bugs on the drives, things that would ping a location when given internet access, but not a single one of them had ever answered back. Wherever the drives were going, it was somewhere the network didn't reach, which is really what got my interest, though only a fraction of it.

When I'd first come across it, doing its logging and downloading, I'd nearly panicked and burned the thing out. Really, I should have been far more worried about it than I was, only... I could guess things from the standards of data that it was told to bring in. Namely, I could tell that its owner was casting as wide a net as possible. He or she knew, in the most general terms, what AI activity looked like, but not the specifics of my activity. Thus, they'd tried to take in any sort of data pattern that looked like AI, save it to a drive, then take it somewhere I couldn't touch it, where any AI couldn't reach it. And I knew for a fact that if I changed something, if I burned it out, it'd spook them bad and I'd probably never find them outside of searching homes until I found the drives while the occupants were out. Given that that wasn't really something I'd wanted to do, I'd sat, watched, waited, a shard of my conscious mind slowly gathering data points and shifting through people that could build, program and access such a machine.

But, that brought up the question of why I was doing this at all. I could put a lot of names to it, many different motives and excuses; that I'd wanted to keep an eye on them, that I thought they might be a threat, that it was simply a puzzle that I'd limited myself so as not to solve it too quickly... but, the truth? I felt lonely.

It was weird, to feel that way. I wasn't a stranger to the emotion, far from, this life or the last, but I wanted a companion. As I was, the best that I could possibly get was a few online friends and acquaintances, something that I didn't really want. Not really. Those relationships would feel fake, constructed, because there'd be so much lying involved in every single one that it couldn't be anything but. This didn't even mention the fact that this, like so many other things, was just another risk, a risk that I didn't want to really need to take. But, I did need someone, someone I could be honest to.

I didn't know why, not really, but I did want a companion. And this person, whomever they were, could be that for me. Of course, there was every single chance that it was a Salarian spy or a complete whackjob maintaining the little box and switching out its drives... but I wanted to believe that it was a normal person, someone who was scared of some big scary AI evil, someone who I could reveal myself to in small pieces. Speak with. And that belief, really, was the thing holding me back from devoting enough resources to solve the puzzle I'd been presented with with any sort of speed and ease. I was scared, scared that I'd follow the breadcrumbs and find an answer I didn't like at the end. It'd happened a couple of times already, little things I'd followed that hadn't lead to places I'd wanted, and now I was reticent towards yet another situation that would turn out like before. And even if I found them, what would I do? Wait, is the answer. Wait until I wasn't a collective of faceless automatons filled with glowing lights, until I wouldn't terrify this person just at a glance. I could wait for companionship. But... for now?

I watched as a father joked around with his kids, the Geth platform I watched from trailing behind them, carrying tents and fishing equipment and supplies. I carried cameras and equipment for an old woman, who spoke to the platform about her work, her grandchildren, her time in the Quarian navy. I cooked for three children, waiting for their parents to come home, playing games and talking about school. I sat with a blind old man that thought I was another Quarian, and listened carefully, recorded everything as he told stories and recounted his life. Billions of lives, lived around me.

It wouldn't fill the hole. But it was enough, if only for the moment.