Milenya stepped forward, suppressing a yawn. While she looked tired, hints of dark circles under her eyes, she seemed calm and relaxed. The long night going over the data and performing tests did not do anything to dispel the relaxing effects of her interlude with Ashana. She tapped on the virtual keyboard to bring up the projections.<span style="color: #6495ED">"Dr. Beruut and I worked on analyzing the samples and data collected. We gathered enough to settle several questions regarding the things."<br/>
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"To set everyone's mind at ease, the most important and immediate finding is that the creatures we encountered cannot directly 'infect' people to create more of their kind. This is not the result of some 'tech-zombie plague.' "</span><br/><br/>The display changes to show several different variations of machines, and a scale drawing comparing it to cell size.<span style="color: #6495ED">"The machines you see here, simple as they appear to be, are nanides and close to the nanometer scale. They are not, however, what fiction would call nanites. There is a level of functionality that simply cannot be built into anything smaller than this, as problems of power, heat buildup and dissipation become insurmountable."<br/>
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"To 'convert' a sapient being into one of these creatures, a particular kind of 'universal' assembler is required, and the bodies and samples we examined simply did not have enough to form any kind of critical mass. In addition, the conversion of a body into this state requires more processing power than the entire network of these nanides can provide. An external director is required."<br/>
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"This is further confirmed by the journal entries of the dig site director. He documented, however unintentionally, the slide into obsession and insanity. There apparently was another machine, even older than the artifacts found at the site. He, and his crew of two-hundred odd people, were drawn to this machine. They became obsessed with it over a period of a few days. One of them chose to let herself be converted into one of the creatures we saw. Instead of being horrified by the result, the others followed suit. From the ramblings at the end, it is clear to me that they had become subsumed into a hive-mind state."<br/>
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"That data correlates with the scans from the bodies. They do not need to speak. Most communication between them occurs through high-frequency EM transmissions. The neural scans taken show multiple small-scale transmitters. Contemporary network design uses one transmitter in order to provide a single communications gateway. The pattern and distribution of the multiple transmitters suggests these converted bodies were sharing sensory information and communicating as nodes in a distributed network."</span><br/><br/>Milenya changes the display, to show a detailed diagram of a husk.<span style="color: #6495ED">"This is the fully converted result. They are physically quite formidable. They are strong and fast, but somewhat clumsy. From experience, they can move silently, and remain motionless for long periods of time. Their communications would be masked by other low-level electromagnetic effects, so they wouldn't be easily detectable before an attack. Their internal organs have been completely converted and replaced to support the synthetic functions; the blue fluid running through what remains of their circulatory system acts as a coolant and a nutrient delivery system for the remaining organic elements. They are not immortal; over time, the organic elements would waste away, until there was nothing to support the physical structure. I suspect that the nanides would then cannibalize the remaining material and store it for later use. However, the same thing that makes them physically strong makes them fragile. They are vulnerable to heat, electricity, and physical trauma, particularly of the high-velocity kind."<br/>
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"They have two major control centers. One is in the skull, supplementing the brain, and the other is in the stomach to take advantage of the protective ribcage. Both need to be destroyed to completely disable one. Destroying the head removes most of its sensory equipment, and destroying the stomach one tears the creature in two and reduces it to crawling with its arms."<br/>
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"Drawing from the journal, these creatures believed themselves to be in service to some creator or master, most likely the race that originally built this conversion machine. The last journal entry clearly details the belief that these masters would return soon."</span><br/><br/>Milenya brings up another picture, a side-by-side image. One was clearly taken at the dig site they just left, and the other was taken on a green, temperate planet. Both of them show almost identical husks, though the ones from the dig site seem sleeker than the others.<br/><br/><span style="color: #6495ED">"We acquired access to military reports. You may or may not have seen the vids, but in 2183, Geth attacked Eden Prime under the direction of the former SPECTRE Saren Arterius. There, the Geth deployed a terror weapon that the Earth Alliance colloquially named 'Dragon's Teeth', after a myth of their Norse culture. These devices turned humans into husks of their former selves. From the data provided, and direct comparison of images and capabilities, what we ran into down there are the same things. Husks. They were used everywhere that Saren visited or attacked, including the Citadel."<br/>
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"We believed the Geth had created them. The age of the dig site indicates a different origin. Further, Dr. Beruut's expert analysis uncovered some unsettling data. Organic compounds are present in the husks we encountered, that are not normally present in human bodies. The ones we encountered were more.. advanced, not as susceptible as the ones on Eden Prime were, but at the same time, they were breaking down rapidly. In addition, there were signs that the nanides had attempted to repair some of the cellular damage, but the resulting organic structures were distinctly alien to the human body. We believe this indicates the conversion process had originally been meant for a pre-Prothean race, possibly the same race that built the ruins."</span><br/><br/>Milenya paused, looking around the room. Whether or not the scale of the revelation was sinking in, she continued.<br/><br/><span style="color: #6495ED">"The Geth did not create 'Dragon's Teeth'. The Geth merely unearthed them and adapted their use to specifically convert humans; the means to create husks has been around for far, far longer. Hundreds of thousands of years, at least. There are other implications, but as they are unproven hypotheses and have no practical effect on our ship, our crew, or our mission, I am excluding them from this briefing."</span><br/><br/>She looked faintly wry as she summed up;<span style="color: #6495ED">"As for what happened down there, the short form is that we stepped in someone else's crap. Whatever organization funded that place was massively wealthy, given to employing humans, and operating under secrecy protocols. They, pardon the crudity, fucked with something they shouldn't have, and then we came in and got it  up the ass."</span><div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>