Mass Effect: Revelation

by Drew Karpyshyn

The revelation that humanity was not alone in the universe hadn’t just impacted Earth’s religions, it had far-reaching effects across the political spectrum as well. But where religion had descended into the chaos of schisms and extremist splinter groups, politically the discovery had actually drawn humanity closer together. It had fundamentally united the inhabitants of Earth, the swift and sudden culmination of the pan-global cultural identity that had been slowly but steadily developing over the last century.

“Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy,” Eisennhorn admonished him. “Sir Isaac Newton said that.”

“Freedom is worth fighting for.”

Though he’d seen it many times before, Anderson still marveled at its sheer size. The middle ring was ten kilometers in diameter; each arm was twenty-five kilometers long and five kilometers in breadth. In the twenty-seven hundred years since the Council was established on the Citadel, great cosmopolitan metropolises known as the wards had been constructed along each arm, entire cities built into the station’s multilevel interior. Forty million people from every species and sector across the known galaxy now made their homes there.

Alliance still used the familiar twenty-four-hour clock based on Terran Coordinated Universal Time, the protocol established in the late twentieth century to replace the archaic Greenwich Mean Time system.

The other option was to transmit data via the extranet, a series of buoys placed across the galaxy that were specifically designed to enable real-time communication between systems. Information could be sent by a conventional radio signal to the nearest array of communication buoys. The buoys were telemetrically aligned with a similar array hundreds or even thousands of light-years away, connected by the tight beam projection of a mass effect field; the space-age equivalent of the fiber-optic cables used on Earth in the late twentieth century. Within this narrow corridor, signals could be projected several thousands times faster than the speed of light. Data in the form of radio signals could be relayed from one array to the next virtually instantaneously. Once the arrays were properly aligned, it was even possible to speak to someone on the opposite end of the galaxy with a lag of only a few tenths of a second.

“Just how strong is this stuff?” he asked the bartender. Maawda shrugged. “Depends on how much you drink. I can leave the bottle if you wish to crawl out of here.”

Anderson knew right then that he didn’t like Saren. Anyone who would use the prolonged pain and suffering of a family member for leverage was a sadist and a bully.

“I have two rules I follow,” Saren explained. “The first is: never kill someone without a reason.” “And the second?” Anderson asked, suspicious. “You can always find a reason to kill someone.”

“When you hear about someone for so long you assume you know something about them,” he said in a more somber tone. “It’s easy to confuse the reputation with the real person. It’s only when you meet them that you realize you never really knew anything at all.”

“There is one more request I would make of the Council,” Ambassador Goyle added, employing one of the most basic, yet most effective, tactics of negotiation: little yes, big yes. Getting someone to agree to a minor concession established a tone of agreement and cooperation. It made it more likely they would be receptive to larger issues.