Kevin Curry
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Psychoprotective Epilogue 11 (Life 9: Subject Zero)
🕑 Added 2024-10-14 14:00:12 +0000 UTCNote: I made a mistake in Tanya’s name in this world. I changed it to the appropriate one in the last chapter. I thought I was being subtle and clever, but alas, I should have read deeper into the wiki page.
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This was the first time they’ve tried to re-enter a world, so they weren’t sure what to expect to have changed from this. The first change was that she gained consciousness faster than she did before; it was the first time they had gotten to experience being mere days old.
Well, they weren’t entirely lucid for that time, but it was more like the time she spent recovering from having her mind nearly shattered, but less painful.
The other interesting fact was that they were Jennifer again, and they were still born on the same day, to the same parents. Conversations with Dad in her last life informed of the history: much like the life before that one, she spent the first six months continually hallucinating as her soul fed her past life memories into her tiny little baby skull. This stress compounded with Mom’s post-pardum depression and led to… difficulties, which eventually led to him taking the aforementioned long-haul cargo ship job due to the paternity benefits, i.e. the automated nursery module.
In this life, her soul had much more practice in dealing with the local neural architecture, so it took much less stress for it to happen. Thus, Dad kept his job as a warehouse manager, and Mom managed to pull through.
As enjoyable as having a normal childhood on Eden Prime was, she had a task to do: find those Prothean ruins early, and figure out what the heck the geth wanted there.
Naturally, she could only do so much as a young child. She knew roughly where the ruins were, but she’d need some kind of personal transport to make it there in any reasonable timeframe, and then she’d need a way to get a whole day to herself to actually do the searching.
So she started to execute her plan: as she started it when she was two, it wasn’t that complicated: she found someone with a flying bike and expressed that it was ‘so cool’. Every drawing, both in digital art programs built for children and with physical crayons, was about flying.
It took two more years for her plan to no longer be needed: Not because she got a hoverbike, that would be horribly irresponsible on the part of her parents. No, it was because she got kidnapped by a doctor for unethical experimentation to, near as she could tell, create the greatest possible biotic.
The Teltin facility’s conditions were the things of nightmares. Literally, she had so many nightmares about this kind of scenario before she got her head sorted out in her third life. Torture just to see how her biotics were affected by pain, complex psychological torture in the form of manipulating her to hate the other children in the facility via a one-way mirror and soundproofing…
Worst of all, there was the pitfighting. Pain when she hesitated, drugs when she was aggressive. Also to make that hate mutual.
If she was literally anyone else in the universe, it would have broken her. But bloodlust was an old friend, and pain was a bitter ex. Even the drugs weren’t anything new, mental acceleration formulae provided a better high. She was able to easily and aggressively dominate her opponents, but without hurting them very much. Each time she succeeded at this, she scoffed, arrogantly saying that they ‘didn’t need to kill someone so weak’.
The first time Jenni-sorry, ‘Subject Zero’ did this, they tried the pain collar. She then murdered both of the guards who were controlling her pain collar. It stopped, the drugs administering as she killed, even if she didn’t kill who they wanted her to.
It took a repeat performance before the guards refused to punish her for creatively misinterpreting their orders, or selectively ignoring parts of them.
But each procedure made her powers grow. She created small wormholes that allowed her to listen in on other rooms in the facility, and learned of the purpose of the other children: disposable test subjects for those procedures, with only successful tests being brought to her.
Unfortunately, she still did not have the confidence of being able to pull off an escape. At least, not without being captured again shortly thereafter. So she endured.
It was about six years into her captivity that the other children decided to break out on their own. Shortsighted, but seeing as how one of the reasons she had held back was because she didn’t want to abandon them, so it was time for Subject Zero to make an escape.
Getting out of her cell was easy: a single biotic flex launched a metal lump she had been saving for this through the one-way mirror, and a second one tore that hole open enough that she could slide through, her personal barrier acting as frictionless padding to help her safely go through the otherwise dangerously sharp hole.
She killed all of the guards, of course. Scientists too. There were thirty-seven other children aged seven to fifteen at the time of the riot, the large numbers probably contributed towards their confidence.
The oldest one was a boy named Jack. She had personally saved his life; his biotic barrier was getting shredded by an assault rifle before she pushed the thing away from pointing at him; even the second-and-a-half it had fired on him had landed sixteen of the tiny metal grains that this universe used in their small arms, shattering his barrier and hitting him in the arm. He had attempted to rally the children, he was probably the mastermind behind the whole thing, but Jennifer rallied them herself and successfully captured a shuttle. Unfortunately, there was no fully capable star ship available, which there would have been if she had been the one to plan an escape. So they didn’t actually take off.
“Okay.” Jenni-no, she’s Tanya again. Why not? “According to this computer system,” Thank you, college education. One of many advantages to recycling universes. “We’re in the Dakka system. There’s a mass relay, but we’ll need a real ship in order to travel it.” This was bad, but not unexpected. The Attican Traverse was not a system claimed by any specific government.
“What do we do?” asked a panicked nine year old girl.
“I stole the head scientist’s omnitool, so… call for help.” Tanya replied, inputting an old address. It failed, no such address exists. “Drat. How about…” Ah, it worked. “Let’s try…” Okay, that one exists too.
Tanya had started sending messages to the human embassy on the Citadel, the Systems Alliance help desk, and other possibly-compromised channels when she got a reply back in the form of a high-latency communication, basically a video call with enough lag that it was more of a series of videos sent back and forth, not a true conversation.
“Who the fuck is this? How did you get this address?” Was the battle-scarred face of an old mercenary.
“I’m a kidnapped ten year old girl with thirty-eight other kidnapped children who need a proper ship to take us anywhere but here.” Tanya said, making sure not to pitch her voice down. “As for how I got your number, I picked it up off a list of mercenaries that Cerebus had.” This was a gamble, she hadn’t done enough searching to identify any such list. “Ever do any jobs for them?”
“...Yeah, there were a bunch of batarian slavers that needed killing. Paid well and in advance.” Mr. Massani replied, “You’re pretty calm for a little girl…”
Tanya trembled, faking fear was easy. “I gotta be strong. For the others.” Several of which were looking over her shoulder. “Now, eventually Cerebus is going to notice that we’ve killed the guards and taken over the base. I need you to find a ship that can carry forty people and bring it here for evac.” She held a fistful of credit chits in front of the camera. “I have this pile of credit chits I looted from the guards, and this planet’s in a system with a Mass Relay, so if you can get the ship it shouldn’t take long. There’s guns and science data and expensive machinery too. Just take us to Eden Prime.”
“...Fuck if I do another job for those bastards.” Zaeed said, scowling. “Yeah, I know a guy with a cargo ship, we’ll talk business once we’re there.”
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Tanya knew that Zaeed was a principled man from her previous life, having met him when he was hired as part of a protective detail back in university; the professor took a bunch of xenobiology students and took them to… Pragia, actually. It was a different part of the planet, but the place was, in addition to being a great place to put a secret facility, a case study of how poorly reckless importation of flora and fauna can go. What an odd coincidence.
The man loved telling stories about his past exploits, and several of the students hung onto every word. Tanya had gotten his extranet address then, and given that she had memorized her contact list when she resolved to try again in this world, she could still use it.
What she did not expect the man to do was to take the multi-million credit payout that the base’s technology and research data represented and then buy a plot of land and several prefab colony houses on Eden Prime, adopting every single one of the biotic orphans (not a single set was spared Cerebus’ knives in the dark) with seven full-time nannies handling the bulk of the work.
It did, however, play into her limited plans. After a month of settling in, Tanya charming the man with her extensive cooking experience (Memaw’s brisket drives yet another man to fanaticism) and ability to manage the children (who idolized her as their hero, even more so than the actual leader of their rebellion, a boy named Jack), she convinced him to buy her a hoverbike for “errands”.
The next time the man left to do some more killing for money, his life insurance up to date and properly filed with his thirty-nine dependents, Tanya took the bike “exploring” once all the other children were set up properly with a well-supplied movie marathon party.
She knew exactly where the Prothean ruins were. She opened her veterinary clinic within the boomtown that had sprung up around the place, taking care of the innumerable pets and the occasional native fauna that was brought to her. Mostly cats. Even with cats being much less prevalent outside Earth due to all of the regulations, she still had five hundred patients of that particular species just for the boomtown, and that was after splitting the patient pool with the other vet that was there before her. Further, she nudged Zaeed’s land purchase to be as close as possible while still being ‘frontier’ with cheap land instead of ‘wilderness’ that would require expertise that they didn’t have.
Granted, this still required that she travel six hundred kilometers to reach the place, but that was what the hoverbike was for. It could do that in two hours comfortably, and make a round trip without needing a refuel. Really, in the field of hover vehicles, eezo blew psitanium out of the water.
Now, the ruins were supposedly discovered by a surveying team seven years from now, ship-mounted orbital scanners finding small eezo deposits along with large caverns, which was a tell-tale sign of Prothean ruins. Supposedly, they were accessible from the surface even before excavation, it just took them a few years to carefully explore the place. The geth just showed up, grabbing or destroying… something. She needed to find it first.
Dishearteningly, she ran out of time before locating it, flying back to the compound and arriving twelve hours after leaving, claiming to have had a fun day trip to the wilderness. She was promptly grounded by the nannies.
On the eleventh attempt to locate the ruins, seven months into her life in Zaeed Massani’s impromptu orphanage, she finally found a crevice that led into a cavern. Using her biotics to hover down into it with a high powered lantern, she grinned: Ruins located.
Naturally, however, there was a problem: it took four years for a dedicated archeological expedition to find the thing that the geth wanted and stole. Even that was an assumption; could she even find it?
Still, the fate of the galaxy was at stake, and if she told everyone about it, she wouldn’t be able to do her own searching, and she’d have to trust that the extra time would be enough to avert things. That… didn’t seem likely to her.
So the solution was simple: use her biotics to tear through the ruins in a search that broke all standards of safe, respectful archeological exploration. She didn’t find anything notable in her first trip, but knowing exactly where the entrance was… or an entrance was, meant she could be far more efficient in the future.
Now, the only question was… what kind of scanners could an eleven year old girl get her hands on?
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As it turned out, living with a mercenary as a father figure along with one of the primary methods of exercise/entertainment being a biotic fight club means that a solid fourteen of the children all wanted to follow Zaeed into his jobs. Because the man was startlingly responsible for someone who killed things for credits, he insisted that they turn 16 first.
Tanya made sure to teach all of them as much as she could, of course. As her ‘nature hikes’ continued to not cause any trouble, she was allowed more and more days off to explore what Zaeed called ‘the best garden world in the galaxy’ without needing to do more than have all of her chores and schooling handled.
After about two years of searching, Tanya decided that she needed some good sensors if she was going to get anywhere. “Mr. Massani, I would like something expensive.” She announced as he was looking over a dossier for his next job in his office.
“Hm? Your bike crap out?” He asked, not terribly concerned.
“I would like an ExoGeni surveyor craft.” Tanya said bluntly. “The Magellan model.” She sent him the specs.
Zaeed took a moment to examine the file. “...You want to go treasure hunting for ruins?” He asked. Tanya blinked in surprise. Zaeed’s functional eye narrowed. “You found some ruins.” He corrected.
“I would be willing to earn the money.” Tanya offered, “You’re already bringing Jack and Ahmed on your next job, I’d double your biotic firepower at least.” One hundred thousand credits was not a small amount of money, but it also wasn’t a large amount, either. Also, she could only kill so many wild animals and break so many things before she starts needing some more stimulating violence. Just because she could manage the addiction Cerberus inflicted on her doesn’t mean she could ignore it.
“Nice try, but you’re too young. I’m not taking a twelve year old to Vatar.” Zaeen said ruefully. “You’ll get your ship, on two conditions.”
“Name them.” Tanya said immediately.
“First, you give up the bike. Julia’s been moaning about wanting one now that she’s fourteen. That surveyor’s your new ride, she gets the bike.” Tanya nodded easily. Fair enough. While there were ten vehicles split among the forty residents, and some of the nannies had cars, having two vehicles would definitely cause strife. “Second, you bring me to those ruins you found. We don’t sit on paydays in this house. We cash in.”
Tanya winced, but nodded. This was why she was so hesitant to ask for equipment upgrades… She’ll need to convince him that there’s greater profit in selling the artifacts piecemeal on the black market instead of revealing the site… and hope that the ruins would be camouflaged among all the other illicit prothean dig sites.
“Right. Now, before I leave tomorrow: is there anything I need to know before I go down there and get mobbed by the little ones?” Zaeed asked.
Well… “Chelsey has a boyfriend now. They went on a date yesterday. Kevin was dropped from the football team last Friday for using biotics one too many times and has been faking going to the practices. Liam’s started to help out in the kitchen, but I don’t think he’s going to stick with it. Himiko’s boyfriend dumped her, and she’s gotten kind of… moody over the whole thing.” That poor, doomed boy… “That’s it for potential landmines.” He kept surprisingly on top of things, so she didn’t need to tell him about the major things, just the small stuff. “Oh, and Selene has homework that she still hasn’t done, if you haven’t checked the tracking software about that.” Was Tanya supposed to have access to her pseudo-sibling’s records? No. Did she fake Zaeed’s credentials anyway? Absolutely. While this was a bit grander of a scale than normal, she did have plenty of parenting experience, so this was all old hat to her.
Still, progress!
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The surveyor increased her ability drastically. As it was literally intended for this kind of work, allowing small explorer teams to scout out locations of interest, the Magellan came with some man-portable scanners as well as the ship-borne ones.
Granted, she had to uninstall the software that reported everything to ExoGeni, but much like in her previous lives with powerful corporations, explanations of gotchas like that were easy to find on the extranet, you just had to be savvy enough to look.
“Look at this beauty.” Zaeed commented, appraising some kind of statuette. “The Shadow Broker’ll buy something like this for five thousand credits.” The Shadow Broker was the galactic kingpin of black markets and info brokering; Zaeed didn’t have many criminal contacts, but he had a good enough relationship with the enigmatic alien that using him as a black market fence was reasonably safe… in Zaeed’s opinion. It will have to do. “Minh! Got another for you.” The ten year old girl ran up, took the statue, and carefully walked it back to the central camp for this little ‘archeological expedition’. They all took a trip once a week, staying the night in the ruins and returning late the next day. Tanya took extra trips on her own, as while her biotics could slowly break up rocks and sealed structures… it was tiring, so she could only do so much per trip. The surveyor was faster than the bike was, so she could take five hours to come here, do some excavation, and then return without much of an issue. It did eat up fuel, but it made the actual expeditions more profitable, so she kept at it.
“Finally got through!” Tanya boasted, biotically moving the rubble of the destroyed wall out of the way. On the other side… “Woah.”
Prothean ruins were everywhere. However, there were… certain things that were more important than others. Art was frittered out to all and sundry, things with no obvious use, but the grand prize at any Prothean site was a functioning database, referred to as a ‘Beacon’ for some reason… like the one right in front of them.
“Jackpot!” Zaeed crooned, even taking out Jesse (his rifle) and doing a little dance. “Luckiest gun in the goddamn galaxy.”
Tanya walked up to the beacon. It was pristine, created using methods far more advanced than the rest of the structures in the ruins. It was placed in such a way as to draw attention to it, on a slightly raised platform with little around it. What did it feel like?
When Tanya touched it, the beacon immediately powered up, and information flooded her mind. It was unexpected, but processing things like this was something she’s done hundreds of times, so she adapted and started going through it.
This was… a warning. The exact same cuttlefish-looking starships flashed through her mind, images of warped life in exactly the same way as she saw before… So that’s what a Prothan looks like. And that’s what it looks like when one is turned into a husk.
What’s more, there were weapons, blueprints for a grand… weapon? Referred to as what she interpreted as ‘Crucible’. Something intended to interface with the Citadel, from the one image of a drawing that showed exactly that. Further, there were images of another planet, with enough supplementary data that she could definitely find it on a star chart, as well as the Relay they’d need to use.
It was a lot of data. She had serious doubts that anyone else could manage to get anything out of this… although from what she understands of asari biology, they could probably do it with a few tries.
Wait. This facility… Oh. She wonders if any of those stasis pods are functional? Over… that way?
The beacon powered down, function fulfilled. “What the hell was that?” Zaeed said, bewildered.
“...Let’s just say I’m special in more ways than one.” Tanya eventually said, “There has to be a way to synchronize normal technology with this, but you’d probably need to be an asari to make sense of the neural uplink.”
“You’re an asari in disguise then? Izzat it?” Zaeed asked.
“Cerberus tried their best to turn me into one.” She lied, “I suspect the protheans had a similar neurology to the asari, capable of some level of direct nervous system communication.” She didn’t know that was how the beacons worked… interesting. “Whether it’s how they have sex? Unclear.” She was leaning on more of a communication method, because the idea that an asari would be able to focus on learning while doing this was… iffy. As pleasurable ‘embracing eternity’ was, as the slang goes, it was always much better for the asari, given equal experience.
“Well, let’s get the payday of a lifetime, then.” Zaeed commanded, turning around. “Shadow Broker’s going to pay tens of millions for this.”
“...I think there’s a greater prize afoot.” Tanya said, looking towards the door in the back of the cavern, cleverly disguised as solid rock. “Get the mining laser.”
“The fuck’s bigger than an intact beacon?” Zaeed asked rhetorically.
“We got the laser!” Shouted Kevin, carrying the weak but compact excavation tool that the surveyor came with. It took an hour for the thing to charge up sufficiently off of the surveyor’s power plant, so they set it up and went for lunch; Tanya had prepared some excellent picnic food and the tables were already set up.
Well fed, with an extra plate set aside for a reason that Tanya wasn’t willing to divulge, they fired the laser, creating a hole into the next cavern. Oddly, the scanner had registered the place as solid rock; it was shielded. The only reason anyone could know it was there was if they had properly digested the information in the beacon.
Inside was a grand chamber with hundreds upon hundreds of stasis chambers. “What the fuck…” Zaeed said, looking at the place.
Very few of the stasis chambers appeared functional; many weren’t even occupied. There was, however, one that was still clearly powered… it may be the only thing left in this entire facility besides the beacon that had it. Tanya went up to it, and pressed the button to unseal it. It was deliberately simple to work with.
Inside… “Wake up, Commander Javik.” Tanya commanded, in the few snippets of Prothean she picked up from the beacon. “The Reapers are coming.”
That did it. The living Prothean’s four eyes snapped open, and he lunged out of his stasis pod. As soon as he registered that she wasn’t another Prothean, he attempted to biotically assert dominance, but she countered it with her own. She then touched his face with a finger, and the alien reflexively opened up a telepathic channel.
After a few minutes of… exchanging memories, Javik calmed. “I see. We have some time. That’s good.”
Tanya grinned. Maybe she’ll get to save the galaxy after all.
Comments
Hex
Nice chapter! Going back through time like that (even if it's just parallel universe shenanigans) sounds rough. For the reader it's not a big deal with how little of the last life we got to see, but take her father for example. Tanya has spent years with this person and suddenly their relationship never happened from his perspective. She didn't spend much time with him this time around, but still. Like imagine if that happened to their psychonauts life, it seems like that sort of thing would mess with somebody. Maybe Tanya's been through enough now for it not to be a big deal, but as a being it would undermine what a "relationship" means if you keep repeating it from the start.
0xFFF1
I wonder if this just creates a parallel universe or if it overwrites the old one. Tanya needs to find a universe that has necromancy or a more general soul magic discipline. Tanya seems to be getting the hang of it by herself but a formal education can only help.
Eric Hicks
Thank you for the chapter, I enjoyed it.
