I stare down at the small, grey, entirely unassuming box. There are a number of cables leading into it, mixed in with the piping in this relatively small space, and there’s a single indicator light- green, flickering at intervals I can match with the internal circuitry and electronic signals passing through its entirely wired connections. If I didn’t already know what it was and what it was doing, if I was only using the optical sensors of the platform I was/was looking through/am, I doubt that even I’d pick it up among the dense mix of already-present electronics and plumbing that filled the space.

I… wasn’t sure what to do about it, or whatever individuals had placed it here. Clearly, it was the work of someone who knew what they were doing with computers… but wasn’t precisely an expert in spycraft. It was too obvious about what it was doing, though in hindsight… I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t just the fact that encryption was about as tough and concealing as cobwebs to me didn’t play into that.

Really, the only reasons that I hadn’t already tracked down exactly who had put up a little autosearch device specifically looking for signs of a present and active AI were that I had too many projects and too few spare platforms, as well as the fact that I hadn’t really wanted to find them. I mean, to be perfectly honest, there wasn’t really a point to looking for them, not practically anyway. Even now, with more platforms being free to expand my base of projects farther, I wasn’t sure that it was worth the time and expended effort to transport a ‘free’ platform here to do this through.

I reached forward, brushing a metal finger across the undusted surface, this space kept entirely clear of such detritus by a mix of ventilation filtration and the fact that no organics really came back here. If I was being perfectly honest with myself, my reasons for seeking this device even now came down to my emotions.

Part of me yearned for free contact with another sapient being that wasn’t… me. Someone that I could be honest with, in my form, my… species, I supposed. I wanted someone I could speak with, express my doubts and fears regarding the future, my plans, my frustration with my limited actions. In stupid tropy scifi AI movie fashion, I wanted a friend.

Another part was… worried.

A big portion of my efforts regarding the world at large was taking subtle, careful steps towards pushing the people of this planet towards what help they’d needed. It’d disturbed me to find that so many with treatable mental health problems went ignored even here, the cultural emphasis on community in Quarian culture still not being enough to bring in those that purposefully chose to disengage from it. This device, the way that it was checked and maintained, put me in mind of a paranoiac- someone whose demons were relentless and invisible, always chasing but never seen.

I didn’t know if they needed help, if they needed my help. I didn’t know if there was even anything wrong with them, or if they just maintained this device as a strange hobby of sorts. But, one thing that came through when whatever brought me here happened was my tendency to be anxious on behalf of other people. And now, I was anxious for this person. Despite myself, I wondered if they had family, friends, if they maintained a healthy work-life balance and a good living space… what sort of person were they? What did they do for a living?

I suppose that was some element of the attraction as well. I knew… not everything, but pretty damn near, about basically every living being on the entire planet, sapient or no. Intricate sensor webs enveloping the entirety of local space and electronic systems being intrinsic to nearly everything on the planet’s surface meant that not one living being could so much as sneeze without SOMETHING somewhere picking it up. Not… that I looked too close at that stuff, I certainly didn’t want to breach people’s privacy more than I already did just by existing as I do, but still. This person, whoever they were? I suppose one could say that I hadn’t spoiled it for myself. In the same breath as I felt loneliness and anxiety and concern, I also felt curiosity and the sort of excitement one gets from looking at a puzzle they know they can solve.

A moment passes, then I remove my finger and cull the line of thought. Thinking of a thinking, breathing being as a puzzle to be solved is part of the reason House was an ass, and that’s very much not the route I want to go down.

A quiet pop-hiss echoes down the corridor as the right side of the platform’s chest opens up, revealing the complex sensor array concealed within. I’d designed this model to fit in with the normal consumer-grade Geth platforms, but I’d lowered the onboard processing and internal memory in order to make space for sensitive instruments that would typically be reserved for platforms used to take accurate scientific readings. I’d had to strip out much of the actual processing power and memory capacity of the platform to include the additional sensors and keep enough battery capacity to properly power the whole thing. Not that it really mattered anyway, considering that I more or less used the processing power of individual platforms in much the way an organic gestalt hive intelligence would use the connected brains of non-sapient beings: that is, it gave me more resources to work with while not being vital. Really, I could just plug a good wireless control unit and, as long as the connection was clear and strong enough, run all the functions of the platform remotely. Really, I wasn’t far off from doing that right now.

Here, in the middle of a large office complex that soared into the air above me with floors into the triple digits, the bandwidth of my connection was such that I didn’t even need to try and fit stronger wireless communication equipment into the chassis with the sensor array and expanded batteries. I had far more bandwidth than I needed for the transfer of sensor readings I was about to take to another, more central server.

The array had a thirty degree reading area, allowing me to take twelve “slices” of sensor readings in a three hundred and sixty degree almost-sphere, with the poles cut off because of the platform’s own body interfering with readings. Ideally, the best sort of sensor drone for this sort of work would be a sphere with the entire surface covered in sensor arrays, capable of pulsing in all directions at once, but it’d be rather hard to sneak such a thing in without anyone noticing- not to mention the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure I could pack all of that into a small enough space with the mass effect tech it’d need for locomotion, the batteries it’d need for power, the sensors and the wireless communication and have it still able to fit down this narrow maintenance corridor designed for more typical Geth platforms performing routine upkeep.

Regardless, twelve scans, each taken in approximately five seconds, in all the directions that mattered. Part of me thought that this effort was a far sight overboard considering the reality of what I was doing, but I felt at least a little assuaged by the fact that this unit was a test prototype, one that needed testing anyway, and picking up the little traces of organic presence that I needed was a good enough excuse to do it this way.

When machines passed through somewhere, they didn’t leave much behind. Depending on their motive parts, they might leave a little bit of carbon dust or something similar, perhaps a bit of lubricant or a few nearly-microscopic metal shavings from where their moving parts rubbed against eachother. However, it would be difficult for even me to identify what machines would have been through a space from those things alone, and almost entirely impossible for an organic to do so. Finding the traces of an organic being passing through a place, on the other hand, was many orders of magnitude easier.

The fact of the matter is that organics are messy. You don’t really get quite a good sense of exactly how messy when you are one, but being as I am, I’ve been frankly a little shocked at how much organics cast off nearly constantly. Skin cells, hair follicles, oil from the hands, fingerprints… organic beings leave signs of themselves everywhere they go, on just about everything they touch. If it wasn’t entirely impossible for me to catch diseases anymore, I think that this experience would have changed me into a hardcore germaphobe- as it is, it just disturbs me a little when I think about it.

Back on topic. The person who placed, maintained and regularly checked the device I had poked passed through here regularly, given my observations of the data chip being removed every so often and replaced with an entirely new blank one. Unless the person in question had been wearing a hazmat grade full body suit or some sort of entrapping mass effect unit that caught all organic detritus, they would have left bits of themselves behind- in fact, all over the place, given that they regularly visited here and it was only cleaned once a month due to lack of organic presence. And, indeed, I quickly picked up the presence of patterns of oil on various pipes and wires where they’d stabilized themselves, hair scattered hither and thither, and little bits of dust that I was certain was made of cast-off skin cells.

The sensors retracted back into the chest of the platform, cover hinging over and locking back into place with another quiet hiss-click. I flexed the claw-like fingers of my hand, panels unlocking to reveal a hole in the center of the palm. I leaned over, holding my hand out, suction from a vacuum unit drawing the skin cells and hair follicles through a tube and into a small container within the same cavity that housed the sensor arrays, where it could be safely stored until I returned the platform to a lab.

I’d considered a lot of ways of tracking the person in question. The absolute simplest method of tracking would be to quite literally station a Geth platform in the tunnel and take a look at their face when they came through, but that was also the most obvious way to scare them off completely. I could plant a bug of some sort, but they’d already purposefully chose this section of maintenance tunnel for its lack of security measures, and I have no doubt that they’d be scanning the place when they came through for bugs and keeping an eye out for anything that looked changed or suspicious if they were as paranoid as I suspected they were. I could always plant a physical tracking device on the chip while it was in the slot, but that would be obvious to anyone who looked hard enough. An alternative would be to trade the chip out for one of my own manufacture with the exact same specifications and design, but with the inclusion of a tiny tracking device within the structure of the chip itself, but that carried so many risks that it wasn’t worth even trying. I could monitor the entrances to the tunnels, but not all of them had security devices pointed in their directions and the same thing that applied to devices planted within the tunnels would be the same for devices placed so they could observe said entrances.

Really, this was the most passive way I’d thought of to locate the person doing this while minimizing any possible risk of direct contact. I didn’t want to spook them, far from, and doing things this way made sure that they wouldn’t suspect that they were being watched any more than their already existent paranoia would make them believe.

I spared one more glance around the space as my palm sealed back up, then walked away. There were other places I wanted to test this chassis before the day was up… not that the day-night cycle of Rannoch mattered all that much to me.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT​

“Remind me why we’re doing this again?”

Tele’bek Reir glanced back at Yttren, his mouth twitching downwards in something vaguely resembling a frown, then turned his attention back to the task at hand. He typed a series of commands into the omnigel printer, a quick series of presses and swipes on a holographic interface that had all the speed of practice with only some minor alterations.

He’d been excited when Ingen had picked him up to be a part of a hush-hush engineering project they were working on. Most companies generally stuck to the safer improvements to existing devices common to the field of R&D, especially in the beginning of their lifespan, but Ingen had been making waves. The company had coalesced seemingly out of the aether, scooping up research people and scientists with good qualifications, and starting up a number of projects that it’d kept under pretty tight wraps. So, when Tele’bek had been tagged by an Ingen representative for a potential research position with one of their engineering labs, he’d been excited. When he found out the pay, he’d been ecstatic: the fact that the lab itself was in the same city as he was already living was just the cherry on top, as far as he was concerned. He’d have been willing to move for the pay alone, he was sold before they even mentioned it.

He watched the printer construct the… thirty fifth? Thirty fifth simulation fur structure so far. He always found the process mesmerizing, watching omnigel formed by a combination of mass effect and electromagnetic fields, then cured with lasers. It was soothing, really.

When he’d been placed on project Vyrra, he hadn’t known what to expect. The name didn’t precisely tell him much: it was the name of a native Quarrian species that had almost gone extinct during the Quarian heavy industry age, he knew that much from half-remembered classes back when he’d been a lot younger. Of course, before they’d even tell him more than the name of the project itself, they’d had him sign so much paperwork that his hand ached by the end of it, but tell him they had.

“Some rich kid’s pet project, I think. Everyone’s nice and comfy with current Geth platforms, not sure what market this’d be aimed for besides ‘company kid toy’,” he replied levelly.

He wasn’t dissatisfied with the work he was doing. No one had done a complete redesign of Geth platforms in ages, companies feeling perfectly secure with contemporary Geth platforms that did their functions perfectly well with easy to manufacture utilitarian designs. However, from what he’d seen looking through the assets and sketches the bigheads upstairs had handed him, the redesign they’d planned was more radical than any he thought he’d ever seen.

Sure, animals were cute and all, but he thought that suddenly producing a Geth platform so radically different from the style that all manufacturers had pretty much universally settled on… well, he didn’t think there was much of a point to it. If it really was a toy for the wealthy, he could have seen such a vanity thing having a purpose, but-

Yttren frowned, adjusting something on her omnitool and glancing back through a window at their current-generation omnigel mix. The Asari had been transferred onto this particular subset of the project because of her past experience and involvement with omnigel development, experience that had actually impressed him when he’d reviewed it. The idea was that, ideally, they’d produce a precise mix of omnigel that could be used to quickly and efficiently print panels of fur-like substance.

“I… don’t know about that.”

She turned her head, looking through the glass panel that gave view into the printer in front of Tele’bek, narrowing her eyes slightly and frowning a little more at how the omnigel flowed into shape. She made some adjustments on her current batch while he extracted the latest test square from the printer and moved it across the lab to another device built to scan it.

“Whaddoyah mean?” he quickly typed a command in, starting the machine itself, which began scanning the prototype for imperfections and print errors.

“I’m not sure… the stuff they want us to use? It isn’t the ultra high tier omni that I’d expect for a high-level product. Honestly, it seems like a lower grade consumer mix with some… weird twists.”

Multiple errors in this one. The problem with the printing process was actually producing an omnigel with the properties and composition that was desired, while also making it easily printable in large-scale industrial omnigel printers. Tele’bek logged the results of the test, then dumped sample thirty-seven into the recycler.

“Yeah, I saw it… it’s not got the, the… printing… flow? Sounds about right. It’s not got the printing flow I’d expect from the high-grade stuff.” he leaned on the counter, raising his eyebrows at the Asari. “Didya see the sketches for what they think the final version’s gonna look like?”

She grimaced. Clearly, she had. “I don’t know what they’re thinking, honestly… it’s not like the market share hasn’t proven that everyone’s perfectly fine with the universal model there is now. I’m not sure what they think making it more, er… animal like is going to accomplish for them.”

Tele’bek tilted his head this way, then that.

“Well… I can say that my kid would love one of those things. Would probably spend all her time hugging it, calling it ‘mister Fluffy’ or something…” The corner of Yttren’s mouth twitched up. “Still… I dunno how they’re gonna market a huggable computer. ‘Specially not the mini ones, not sure how those are supposed to get any sorta traction when omnitools already exist…”

A hand wave. “That I can at least understand, the sheer novelty of having a unique alternative to an omnitool might make a niche market for them. The problem I see is that, instead of having us try to figure out a way of making a high-quality high-price product, we’re being directed to make something that’s looking more and more like something marketed to replace low and mid-grade consumer models.”

“Ah, well, I don’t exactly ask the questions, I just do the research, hun.” Yttren snorted.

Tele’bek turned his head, looking over at a pure white Geth research assistant platform walking through the lab carrying a tray, and briefly considered what it’d look like if it was anything like the concept drawings he’d been shown. Almost immediately, he winced.

Simulated fur wouldn’t exactly work in a lab setting. The tail’d be right out.