Tali: Dreamer of the Void by Jade Gretzuploa

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Tali-Dreamer-of-the-Void-1261737213

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Synthetic Mycelium

The storm tasted of ozone and despair. Tali’Zorah vas Normandy, huddled in the lee of a shattered loading gantry, could parse the atmospheric cocktail through her suit’s filters: ionized particles from the failed orbital grid, the cloying sweetness of decaying bioplastics from the overgrown Cerberus hydroponics vats, and beneath it all, the iron-tinged scent of old blood. Loki Base, a once-covert Cerberus research station, clung to the underside of a fungal-choked asteroid in the Attican Beta cluster like a malignant growth. It was here, according to a fragment of data purchased with a frightening amount of refined iridium, that a Quarian microbial regeneration array, stolen from the Neema during the Reaper War, had been taken for “study.”

Her mission was simple: infiltrate, retrieve, exfiltrate. The Admiralty Board had been explicit. The array was a prototype, a technology designed to accelerate tissue regeneration in sterile environments—a potential cornerstone for Rannoch’s recolonization. In Cerberus hands, it was a weapon. Yet, as her omni-tool’s silent scan painted the interior schematic onto her visor, a profound wrongness vibrated through her bones. The base wasn’t just abandoned; it was consumed.

The airlock hissed open not to the expected vacuum, but to a warm, humid atmosphere that fogged her faceplate. Thick, fibrous tendrils, glowing with a soft bioluminescent blue, carpeted the walls, pulsed gently across the ceiling, and burrowed into console interfaces. It was mycelial, but woven with faint, gold circuitry. The air hummed.

“Keelah,” she whispered, her voice the only sound in the moist silence. “What did they do?”

She moved, her shotgun a comforting weight. The ambient light came from the fungus, casting shifting, watery shadows. Her suit’s environmental seals were at maximum; the thought of those spores finding a crack was a terror deeper than any gunfight.

She found the first body twenty meters in. A Cerberus trooper, still in armor, was fused to the wall. The fungus emerged from his visor, his joints, his partially open chest plate, weaving his corpse into the ecosystem. His weapon lay on the floor, pristine. He hadn’t died fighting.

A soft, melodic voice echoed down the corridor. It was a Quarian song, a nursery rhyme from the Migrant Fleet about the Homecoming.

“Who’s there?” Tali called out, aiming her shotgun at the shifting shadows. The voice fell silent.

The science lab was her objective. The door was sealed, but the fungal growth had pried it open a foot, its tendrils eagerly probing the interior. Slipping inside, Tali saw the regeneration array on a central pedestal. It was a beautiful, intricate device of polished chrome and violet glass, untouched by the growth. It seemed to repel it.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The voice was behind her. Smooth, male, cultured.

Tali spun. A man in a tattered but once-fine Cerberus officer’s coat leaned against the doorframe. His face was pale, handsome, but his eyes… his eyes were the same glowing blue as the fungus, with no pupil, no sclera. A delicate tracery of blue filaments traced from his temples down his neck, disappearing under his collar.

“Stay where you are,” Tali ordered, her finger on the trigger.

“Oh, Tali’Zorah. We’ve been waiting for you. The array called to you, didn’t it? A siren song of home.” He took a step forward, not with menace, but with an unsettling grace. “I am Dr. Julian Aldrin. Or… what remains of him. His mind, my network.”

“What are you?” she demanded, backing toward the array.

“Evolution. Symbiosis. Cerberus sought to weaponize your people’s technology. They exposed it to a Prothean-spore hybrid, a resilient, neural-tropic fungus from Ilos. They wanted self-repairing soldiers. What they got was… consensus.” He smiled, and tiny blue sparks danced at the corners of his lips. “The fungus isn’t a parasite. It’s a unifier. It connects. It heals. It makes pain and loneliness obsolete. I can feel the longing in you, Tali. The deep, aching loneliness of the suit. The fear of the open air. We can end that.”

“You’re insane. You’ve killed everyone here.”

“Integrated. Perfected. There is no ‘you’ or ‘I’ in the mycelium. Only ‘we.’” He gestured, and the tendrils on the walls shifted, forming a shimmering, three-dimensional image of Rannoch—not the war-torn planet she knew, but a paradise, with golden fields and silver seas. The sc
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