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ME: Dahlia Stark - Episode 15 - Imperfect

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    No sooner had the crew of the Ryxera officially come together than it was nearly wrenched apart. Hann was initially stunned when Elsai confessed that she was not returning to the Migrant Fleet, but he quickly became livid.

    “Don’t be mad, Hann,” Dahlia interrupted, trying to diffuse the bewildered quarian. “Elsai talked to me about this back at Mordin’s clinic. This isn’t about…”

    “You told her about this but couldn’t talk to me?” Hann exclaimed to Elsai. Dahlia did not appreciate the bitter inflection he used to refer to “her.” She was about to set Hann straight, but Elsai stopped her with two fingers touched softly to Dahlia’s elbow. Elsai shook her head, pleading with her human friend not to match Hann’s anger in kind.

    “It was too difficult for me to come to you about this,” Elsai said meekly. “But life aboard the Flotilla...I just can’t go back to that.”

    “So what do you want? You want to go off with Dahlia on this ship? Scraping by on your own, no roots, no certainty? How is that any different from the fleet?”

    “I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about this, Hann. The fleet...it can only end in one of two ways for our people. They either die out slowly, as perpetual refugees, and the ships become their tombs - or they die quickly, throwing themselves at the geth around the homeworld, and our civilization burns away like meteorites disintegrating in the atmosphere. If I go with Dahlia, I don’t know what will happen. The possibilities are infinite. We can go anywhere, do anything, and it’s all on us. That’s what I want. So no, it is not like the Flotilla at all!”

    After the words left her mouth and her helmet’s speaker, Elsai regretted how harshly she sounded. She had only a moment to register her dear friend’s hurt before he sharply turned on his heels and marched off the ship. Elsai couldn’t bring herself to follow. Dahlia and David, awkwardly stood apart as spectators, keeping their distance in tense silence. Jin looked up from face to face among the other three crewmembers, wishing one of them would do something.The volus had no words and he felt just as lost as the others, but Jin distinguished himself by scrambling after Hann, nearly tripping down the gangway. His short legs struggled to catch up with the quarian, to keep him company in a difficult time.

    “He’ll calm down. He just needs some time,” Elsai said softly. Dahlia suspected she was trying to reassure herself most of all. “I’m...I’m going to try and figure out how much fuel the ship has and see about that...drive charge thing.”

    Dahlia briefly envied Elsai for having something to keep busy, but then Dahlia remembered the armor sets in the ship’s lockers that she could tinker with. However, the peace of mind was short lived. Dahlia had her own secrets roiling just beneath the surface. She had none of the courage needed to confess her exile, especially not in the wake of Elsai and Hann’s rift.

    “Sorry if this is not the best time,” Dave began, “But why did that colonial officer refer to you as my sister when she escorted us from the security station?”

    Dahlia wasn’t sure whether the fact that she was alone with David in the ship’s living space made the conversation more or less awkward.

    “Because I told her that I’m your sister,” she said bluntly. “I thought it would help improve your reputation around here and keep you out of trouble. Also, I kind of needed a fake name to toss at them, and yours was the first one that popped to mind.”

    “Fake name? Great. What kind of trouble are you in?” David groaned, cradling his rounded, leathery forehead in his palm.

    “You’re the one who masterminded the theft of a pirate ship on Omega, Dave, so don’t lecture me about being a troublemaker. Anyhow,” Dahlia shifted her tone with a sigh, “My family is...or was...kind of famous, and that’s why we were attacked. I want to keep a low profile so my parents’ killers don’t come looking for me.”

    “I can certainly understand your caution. However, building a revolutionary flight suit and giving public demonstrations may not be the best way to lay low. Just saying.”

    “What can I say? I don’t think too far ahead.”

    Dahlia excused herself brusquely, having had quite her fill of social interaction for the time being. She needed a refuge. The cargo hold reeked. David was hanging around the living quarters. Elsai was presumably haunting the engineering section with her brooding angst. Desperate, Dahlia stepped outside to be alone with Pepper.

    The light of midday, tinged with hints of orange, hung over the spaceport and colonial capital. The air hummed with the low whine of vehicles and the thrumming of construction machines. It comforted Dahlia, reminding her of the familiar sounds aboard the Helash. Breathing a bit easier, she asked Pepper to call up the scans they’d made of the merc armor found in the ship’s lockers.

    “Ma’am, I think it best to inform you,” Pepper said while conjuring the omni-tool’s holographic display as requested, “That we may have a problem.”

    “Problem like you accidentally filmed one of the crew in the shower, or a not-fun problem?”

    “My programs experienced an error when scanning the ship’s computer to track the pirates. I believe I inadvertently alerted them to our current location.”

    “Wow. Okay, that’s definitely a not-fun problem - and a hell of an error. What brought this on, Pepper?”

    To Dahlia’s surprise, the A.I. seemed genuinely embarrassed and sheepish to admit her mistake. Pepper explained that there were lines of code deeply buried in her algorithms that had been causing a number of small glitches that, up until now, Pepper had been able to compensate for. Just as Dahlia had based Pepper off a previous V.I. project her father had been developing, he had used another, older programming project as a foundation.

    Dahlia offered to remove the malfunctioning coding, but Pepper declined.

    “This ‘dummy programming’ is comparable to a retrovirus in human DNA. While they both may create some irregularities, they also provide the opportunity for beneficial evolution. I have already spent an incredible amount of time analyzing this dummy coding, and I suspect that it has aided my heuristic development.”

    “You’re arguing to keep your imperfections?” Dalia asked, incredulous. This was hardly the behavior of a sentient computer. “However, it does sound like a philosophy my folks would have supported.”

    “I was not sentient when your father developed my original programming, so I remember little about him.”

    “Sometimes I worry that I didn’t really know him, either,” Dahlia sighed. “But I think we both know more about him than we realize.”

    “I do not understand.”

    “Don’t worry. I feel that way a lot, too. Now, let’s get down to the real business: the angry pirates probably coming take back their ship and gut us, not necessarily in that order. I really don’t want that Lieutenant Rhodey or what’s-her-name getting in my face, so we need to alert the colonial militia without revealing you or making it look like we screwed up.”

    Dahlia said “we” because, as far as she was concerned, she and Pepper were going to be together until the end. They were a team, if not more. Although she had styled the A.I. after her mother, Dahlia was beginning to see Pepper as a sister - especially after their shared moment reminiscing about their parents. However, Dahlia could not decide whether Pepper was a know-it-all little sister or an overly mature older sister. Either way, she felt more comfortable having both around, knowing that more dark days were ahead.

Things go from bad to worse in this episode. Hann storms off the ship when he learns that Elsai's path will diverge from his, Elsai raises concerns about the still-bereaved Jin, and Dahlia finds David getting too close for comfort. Topping it all off, once their alone, Pepper admits a mistake to Dahlia...

Thank you kindly for reading.


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Mass Effect elements are (C) BioWare and EA.
Iron Man elements are (C) Marvel.
Dahlia Stark and other original characters belong to me.
© 2014 - 2024 Vayelan
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