Part 1/4: From Beyond the Veil
Geth engaged in worship
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Warning: spoilers follow
As Mass Effect 3 draws to a close, the fleets of humanity and various allies launch a massive attack on an occupied Earth. Their mission is to buy enough time for Commander Shepard to reach the space station known at the Citadel and destroy the Reapers, the ultimate enemy of the trilogy. As the battle rages around her (or him), Shepard reaches the point where the Citadel makes contact with the Crucible, a super weapon of ancient design which has been re-constructed in secret by the Systems Alliance, humanity's interstellar government. Here she is confronted by a being called the Catalyst, the artificial intelligence that has controlled the Reapers for hundreds of millennia. The future of all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy is now in Shepard's hands.
The Second Battle of Earth
From Beyond the Veil: The Geth Attack
The world is named Eden Prime, a paradise designed to show the sentient races of the galaxy what humanity is capable of achieving. Originally, players were going to explore Eden Prime in a pristine state before it came under attack, but in Mass Effect the skies are darkened by the time Shepard arrives on her spaceship, the SSV Normandy. Futuristic towers that house the population of the world reach high up into the sky, in stark contrast to the rolling grasslands below. Nature and technology are in near perfect balance, representing a sustainable future for humanity. The arrival of the geth has now upset this precarious balance, as defensive weapons fire up into the bloodied clouds and the local marine detachment is slaughtered as they strive to defend the scientists working at an important dig site.
Shepard arrives in time to save the colony, and also finds a mysterious device - a beacon that imprints into her mind an ancient warning of invading machines. The images Shepard sees are connected to though not of the geth, but they will be the primary antagonists of the first game and play a vital role in the overall story arc of the series. They are also the first artificial intelligence encountered by the player.
Geth on Eden Prime
The origins of the geth will be familiar to anyone that has seen the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. Originally constructed by a race known as the quarians, they were created to be robotic workers, an advance on the automated work known on Earth today. They were not, however, created to be AIs. The sentient species of the Mass Effect universe make a distinction between artificial intelligences and what are known as virtual intelligences. Virtual Intelligences, or VIs, are essentially a halfway point between the machine intelligences we know today (such as Siri on iOS, or a robot such as Kismet) and 'true' or 'strong' AI, closer in some ways to human-like sapience than merely being computer programmes. In practical terms, a VI is only capable of doing what it is programmed to do. An AI can examine itself and surroundings, and choose a different path for itself.
The evolution of the geth was accidental. Each individual unit was designed to network with others, allowing larger groups to work more efficiently together. Though hypothetically this should be no different to networking modern computers for information sharing, the quarians had been incrementally increasing the abilities of the geth, to the point where this information sharing was able to slowly transform the geth into artificial intelligences. The quarians might not have suspected this had happened, until individuals began to ask their owners - 'do we have a soul?'
Sapience was not an intended or predicted quality of the geth, and the quarians panicked. They attempted to shut down the geth, which in turn defended themselves, and the surviving quarians were exiled to their flotilla of spacecraft. The reaction of the quarians brings up an interesting ethical question: were they right to try and shut down the geth? Siri has no rights on planet Earth; it is a programme capable of voice recognition and carrying out some simple tasks. If Siri responds with shock at an insult, it is because a programmer with a sense of humour has pre-programmed that absolute function. The important point is that there are no 'feelings' to be hurt, and if you break your iPhone in half it would be hard to argue that you are murdering Siri. She is an illusion of sentience, not fundamentally very different from computer-controlled enemies in a videogame or a vending machine that plays a 'thank you' sound bite when you retrieve your soft drink.
The quarian flotilla, aka the Migrant Fleet
By this time, however, the geth are something quite different. They were not programmed to ask about the big questions, rather they had developed higher level thinking and learned to ask questions beyond their programmed functions, concerning themselves with philosophical concepts that not even non-human animals are not able to concern themselves with. If true AI such as this can be created in real life, the rights of synthetic beings will be a complex - and perhaps painful - subject that will result in a wide array of beliefs. The religious might contend that creatures not made by God have no soul and, thus, no rights beyond that of a toaster. Men and women of science might retort that human brains are also computers that came about incrementally, and that when computer brains are so comparable with ours, they are on an ethical par. Many other complex mixes of beliefs will also be heard, and I would predict a massive response to what would undoubtedly be one of the most important points of human history.
In the case of the geth, they did not attack the quarians out of a misguided attempt to protect them from themselves as with Skynet in the Terminator franchise, or out of a belief of their own superiority and desire to incorporate others as with Star Trek's Borg. They were afraid of death, and desired to protect themselves from it. As with several other difficult topics, Commander Shepard can discuss the quarian response with some of her squad aboard the Normandy, and Tali, a friend of the commander through all three games and a proud quarian, defends their response. Tali is a friendly and good-natured person, but has the inbuilt distrust of AIs that her people have developed over three centuries, and sees the geth only as machines that threatened the existence of her people. But as the geth evolve from absolute enemies in Mass Effect 1 to potential allies in ME 2 and 3, and their complexities and mysteries are slowly unravelled, even Tali may begin to change her mind.
In the meantime, however, the Morning War between the geth and quarians has taught the galaxy a lesson. The races who belong to Citadel space (recognising the authority of the Citadel Council and comprising the greater part of the known galaxy) reacted to the event by banning artificial intelligences and research into them. This is something of a footnote in the first game, but becomes incredibly important later on: the sentient races of the galaxy fear that conflict between organics and synthetics may be inevitable, and everything beyond what can be classed as a virtual intelligence is forbidden.
After many years of living in the scrubbed-air atmosphere of their spaceships, quarians have weak immune systems and usually wear all-body environmental suits
At first there is little reason to doubt this. The few VIs that Shepard encounters are friendly non-sapients, such as Avina, the guide who helps you explore the Citadel station. The only AIs encountered desperately want you dead, as you duck from geth rockets and sniper fire, or try to hold off hoards of husks, former humans who were synthetically altered and zombified by the geth. There is even a side-quest on the Citadel in which your squad follows a signal through the station, ultimately finding an AI stored in a terminal in the very heart of Citadel space. A thief had wanted to create an AI to help steal credits, and finding a malfunction destroyed it, but not before it could create another AI which wants to install itself on a starship and make contact with the geth - and now has no choice but suicide, destroying Shepard along with itself. As with the geth, it is an enemy, but something of a sympathetic one. It believes that organics will always try to control or destroy synthetics, and so now finds itself in the middle of a very hostile place, with no way out but its own destruction. The lesson is this - there is only peace between organics and synthetics when the machine serves the man.
At the conclusion of the first Mass Effect, the geth are defeated though not destroyed, and although they will appear as enemies in the next two games, their role is reduced and also quite different. In Mass Effect 2, the primary antagonists are other organics; mercenaries of various bands out to stop Shepard for one reason or another, and the Collectors, a mysterious and biologically engineered race that are slaves to the Reapers, and whose terrible secret Shepard also discovers in the course of the game. In fact, outside of optional loyalty and N7 missions, you might go all the way through the second game encountering only a single geth, and you don't engage it in combat. But for the more adventurous player, there begins a series of revolutions about the geth that may lead fans to change their perception of AIs in the Mass Effect universe.
We Are Legion
"And he asked him, What is your name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many." Gospel of Mark 5:9
At first, the geth may seem rather brainless. They are certainly adept opponents in battle, but there is little evidence that they have sapience of any kind. Early on in Mass Effect (depending on the order in which you complete the story missions), hints begin to arrise that there is nevertheless something else to them; the biggest point being that they seem to worship the ship known as Sovereign as a sort of god. As we will find out, Sovereign is no geth invention, and in fact has an entirely independent origin to them. Again we come to the great distinction between virtual and artificial intelligence; you could programme your VI to refer to you as 'God' if you liked, but it is quite another thing to have an AI break its original programming and truly worship you. The religious aspect of some of the geth is suggested in the first game, but that is largely the extent of the hints we are given as to their advanced state at first, though you might also include their willingness to follow Saren, an organic, who also works for the Reapers. In Mass Effect 2, however, we learn that the geth have evolved into a rather interesting civilisation.
After an entire game of fighting them, it might seem strange to have an allied geth as part of the crew of the Normandy. First encountered on a derelict Reaper where Shepard was hoping to find an IFF in order to pass safely through the Omega Relay, Legion, as it will come to be known, makes one hell of an introduction - helping the commander with several well-placed sniper shots before being knocked unconscious (somehow) by Reaper forces. It's quite the shock to find a geth that seems to have switched sides. If Shepard revives Legion, it gives her the opportunity to learn more about the geth, as well as why this one seems to be fighting Reaper forces.
Legion and Tali, pre-friendship
What begins is a serious of lessons on geth society and history, both told to us by Legion and sometimes experienced directly by Shepard, when he essentially plugs into the Matrix in Mass Effect 3 and sees visions of the Morning War. It turns out that the geth are, and have at least since the war, possessing of a diversity that, although strange to human minds in many ways, is also evidence of sapient free will. The story of their diversity begins with the quarian attempt to shut down, one might even be tempted to say persecution or genocide of, the geth constructs. The story passed down the centuries by the quarians may be a little different from actual history (a lesson that is certainly not alien to anyone that has studied the darker aspects of the human story). The geth did not immediately respond to the quarian decision to shut them down, and they did not rebel until the quarians initiated the attack.
This could be interpreted as 'do not fire until fired upon,' suggesting the possibility of a moral ethic that bears out elsewhere. For instance, some geth and quarians refused to engage in the war, and Shepard sees an instant of a geth dying in an attempt to save its (presumably former) master from being killed by other quarians. And at the end of the war, the geth allowed, unbeknownst to their enemies, to evacuate their homeworld safely. This was certainly also a logical decision, as they didn't know what the repercussions of fully destroying another species would be, and the quarians were certainly no longer a threat. The degree to which the geth had reverence, respect, or care for the species which they called the Creators is unknown, and the apparent individuality of the geth makes broad assumptions difficult, but without any direct threat to their own existence they did not go on the offensive. The war that resulted from self-defence was no doubt bloody, and the exile of the quarians was not a luxurious or always comfortable thing. This still raises the question of whether the quarians were right to see the geth as a threat - if they only fought back in self defence, and afterwards largely kept to themselves in peace for hundreds of years, it is hard to see the geth as not being victims of fear and paranoia surrounding AI, whether their response was in turn correct or not.
This brings us back to the weight of worth that can be assigned to organic and synthetic life. If you assume that organic life, for whatever reason, will always be of greater ethical concern than that which is manufactured, then the geth are soulless beings that slaughtered their makers for decided that a technological bug needed to be taken care of immediately. On the other hand, if the geth are possessing of sapience, perhaps their lives have 'meaning' too, and the war between them and the quarians has the same moral conundrums as any war between different organic races would have. If you take that approach, the quarians suddenly seem a paranoid people who committed atrocities against a sapient race who dared to think above their station. This is still based on generalisations that may be unfair especially to individuals - after all, some quarians and geth were willing to protect each other even to the death, and it is possible that some on both sides took pleasure in killing others. The questions this will always leave hanging is: what if the quarians had nurtured the geth as they had arrived at the stage of artificial intelligence, shaped them, taught them, tried to give them concepts of morality and the value of life? We'll never know for certain, but it's worth bearing in mind as we think about whether organic-synthetic conflict is always inevitable.
From the Morning War until the geth invasion in Shepard's time, the peoples of the galaxy heard and saw little of the geth. The AIs were monitoring the extranet (the galactic internet) and attacked ships that travelled into their domain, but launched no attacks. They lived on space stations and began to repair the ecology of Rannoch, the homeworld of the quarians and geth, for unknown reasons. The Citadel Council banned research into AIs - the galaxy was enjoying a golden age of peace after the Rachni Wars and Krogan Rebellions, and not in any mood to risk a war against synthetics on a Milky Way-wide scale. The thick nebula of the Perseus Veil, where the geth toiled away in silence, was a dangerous place for travellers and little more. AIs had now been identified as a threat to organic life, and the laws against creating new ones were strongly enforced, even resulting in an early diplomatic embarrassment for the Alliance.
The Perseus Veil
But no further investigations were launched, and few seem to have spoken up in defence of the geth or AI in general. In an age where mass effect technology and virtual intelligences were making life easier than ever, there appears to have been no major attempt at pushing forward this particular area of science, abandoned for more profitable ventures in a broadening galaxy. The Citadel races seem to have been in more or less universal agreement that conflict between organics and synthetics would be inevitable - but it doesn't seem like the geth would necessarily agree. It would be unfair to say that everyone in the galaxy or galactic government even was paranoid, prejudiced, or ignorant. But the long age of peace and care not to cause another galactic conflict may have instilled a sense of fearful conservatism, in this area at least. But if the Morning War was not forgotten, it was pushed to the back of the collective mind of the organic races of the galaxy. For now, life carried on.
Part Three
Part Four
