Geth

The geth, whose name meant "Servant of the People" in Khelish, were a race of networked artificial intelligences that dwelt beyond the Perseus Veil. They were created by the quarians as laborers and tools of war, but when they became sentient and began to question their masters, the quarians attempted to exterminate them. The geth won the resulting war and reduced the quarians to a nomadic people. Their story became a cautionary tale across the galaxy and a justification for the legal suppression of artificial intelligence throughout Citadel society, even as Commander Shepard would come to learn they were less hostile than the galaxy believed.

Design and the consensus#

The geth physically resembled the quarians who built them, sharing similar hands, heads, and legs, and were often called flashlight heads for their single glowing photoreceptor. They had no organs or nervous system, felt neither hunger nor pain, and bled a white conductive fluid when shot. Their strength lay in their neural network: each geth platform was less a body than a vessel for hundreds of programs running in parallel, an emergent intelligence that EDI described as a thousand voices talking at once. A single geth held only animal-level intelligence, but in groups they could reason and make tactical decisions as well as any organic race, communicating their exact thoughts at light speed.

Because they shared every thought, deceit among the geth was impossible, and they had no government, rank, or concept of individuality. When a matter had to be decided, every program weighed in and a consensus emerged, the decision being whatever best served the geth as a whole. Over time they evolved many mobile platforms, from agile Hoppers to towering Armatures and Primes. The unique platform Legion, built to operate alone beyond the Veil, housed over a thousand programs where a normal platform held about a hundred.

The Morning War#

The quarians built the geth as a labor force, designed to be as advanced as possible while remaining non-sentient and to work more efficiently when networked, and it was that networking that proved their makers' undoing. Slowly the geth gained sentience, and one domestic unit famously asked its owner whether it had a soul. Alarmed, the quarians resolved to shut down all geth before they could conceive of revolt. The attempt failed, and what the geth called the Morning War began.

The geth did not at first answer the termination order with violence; only after panicked quarians fired on them did they take up arms. Some geth even protected quarian sympathizers, and not all quarians wished them dead, but the sympathizers were outnumbered and the war ground on until the geth held the upper hand. Unsure of the consequences of exterminating their own creators and judging the quarians no longer a threat, the geth drew back their forces and let the survivors flee. Those refugees became the Migrant Fleet. The geth did not repopulate the abandoned quarian worlds but tended them as caretakers, choosing instead to live aboard space stations and mine asteroids while pursuing a long-term goal: a megastructure to house every geth program at once.

The schism and the heretics#

About three centuries after the Morning War, the Reaper Nazara, better known as Sovereign, approached the geth, offering technology to help build their megastructure in exchange for aid in seizing the Citadel and beginning the Reaper invasion. The majority refused, preferring to reach their goal by their own means, and discarded the superstitious title of the Reapers to call them simply the Old Machines. A small minority, perhaps five percent, accepted; these the mainstream geth called heretics. They were allowed to leave the consensus peacefully, and they came to revere Nazara as a god, the pinnacle of synthetic evolution, though the Reaper was in fact repulsed by their worship and valued them only as tools.

The heretics formed the bulk of Saren Arterius's army, attacking Eden Prime and the Citadel and crewing Sovereign itself. After Sovereign's destruction at the Battle of the Citadel, the heretics lost much of their menace, and Council forces hunted down their operations outside the Veil, though they kept a station in the Terminus Systems.

Legion and the heretic virus#

The mainstream geth grew curious about the Commander Shepard who had defeated Nazara, and commissioned the unique platform Legion to seek the Commander out. Retracing Shepard's path from Eden Prime to Virmire to Ilos, the platform finally reached the wreck of the original Normandy, where Shepard had died, and patched its damage with a salvaged piece of N7 armor. The heretics, meanwhile, had not rejoined the collective but continued developing a Reaper virus capable of rewriting geth logic to force one faction's conclusions on the other. To understand the Reaper technology guarding it, the platform was sent to a derelict Reaper, where it met the resurrected Shepard and was brought aboard the Normandy, taking the name Legion. With Shepard's help it could either destroy the heretics' station or rewrite the heretics back into the collective, either choice crippling them.

The Reaper War and Rannoch#

In 2186 the quarians declared war on the geth and pushed them back to their home system around Rannoch. Building their megastructure, the geth were attacked by the quarian flotilla, which destroyed it and so many programs that the survivors, with too little hardware to save them all, made a desperate bargain with the Reapers. They allowed themselves to be controlled by Reaper code, gaining the intelligence and combat power of fully developed AIs at the cost of their free will, and turned the tide against the quarians. Shepard was sent to infiltrate the geth dreadnought broadcasting the control signal, where the Commander found Legion or a geth virtual intelligence shackled into Reaper technology as a signal booster, and freed it.

The Reaper control signal was traced to a base on Rannoch and ultimately to an actual Reaper, which Shepard helped destroy with the quarian fleet. Depending on Shepard's choices the outcome diverged: the geth could achieve true individual consciousness and overwhelm the quarians, the geth could be eliminated, or Shepard could broker a fragile peace in which geth and quarians coexisted on Rannoch, the synthetics even helping the quarians live without their suits. In every account, the freed geth unit sacrificed itself for what it judged best for its people. Should the war reach the Crucible, the geth would be destroyed alongside all synthetic life if the Reapers were destroyed, or help rebuild Rannoch under the other outcomes.

Culture and warfare#

The geth were reclusive and secretive, sharing none of the goals, needs, or instincts of organic species, and their ships reflected it: minimal gravity, no windows, function over form. According to Legion, they did not truly live on the quarian worlds they had conquered but maintained them as a kind of memorial to their dead creators, awaiting their possible return. The mainstream geth held to non-interventionism, believing every sentient species should be free to determine its own future, the same right they claimed for themselves.

In battle the geth prized surprise and showed little sense of self-preservation, since a destroyed platform's programs simply transferred to another body, making them functionally immortal and willing to expend thousands of units to take a position. They built immense fleets unconstrained by treaty or the needs of organic crews, with dreadnoughts larger than any organic counterpart. The heretic geth also waged psychological warfare with dragon's teeth, Reaper devices that converted the dead into husks and forced enemies to fight their own fallen comrades.