UNC: Rogue VI

From Mass Effect Wiki

UNC: Rogue VI is an assignment from the Alliance military. Successful completion of this assignment allows Commander Shepard to learn a specialized class talent.

Location: Local Cluster, Sol, Luna (Earth's moon).

This mission is triggered after about level 20; when you look at the Galaxy Map, Admiral Hackett will ask you to take out a Virtual Intelligence that is no longer responding to shutdown commands.

[edit] Walkthrough

You find yourself on a flat crater-bottom on the Alliance Training Ground. Earth is visible in the starry sky. Consult your map to determine your location and route - the route out of the crater is not obvious. There is an ancient CCCP moon orbiter to be found, crashed in the crater - it may contain valuable items, but don't stay out on the surface too long. There are turrets scattered around the landscape of Luna, which are hostile. When you get to the top plateau - probably after giving the MAKO a real workout over some very rough and pathless lunar terrain - you will have to take the 2 turrets on each of the 3 buildings down. Once you've done this, head down into a building and take out the flying drones in each second room. Then head further into the building - there are two last rooms where you need to blast away at the VI's systems. Repeat this in each of the buildings. Each time you take out a system, another defense mechanism is activated. However, exploding VI controls can damage you, as well as the VI.

• First Security Measure: Toxic gas is released.
  • The gas doesent seem to do anything, such as 'Level 1 Toxic Hazard', the power junctions do cause minor toxic damage anything in close proximity, including the drones.

• Second Security Measure: Shielded doors.
  • Typically one or two shotgun or sniper rounds can take them down.

• Third Security Measure: More defense drones.
  • These spawn in the computer room opposite to whichever one you are in when you take down the first computer system.

Once the mission is complete you will be presented with a text dialog depicting the VI's final moments, after which you will be rewarded with a class specialization.

[edit] Trivia

After the VI is destroyed, the terminals display the following message in binary, repeated over and over,

01001000

01000101

01001100

01010000

Converting the binary to any common ASCII-like specifically 8-bit Latin text encoding reveals that the message reads 'HELP'.

For purposes of role-playing, to translate this into text in the short period of time Shepard was exposed to it, one needs knowledge of 3 things related to computers & their programming:

• Knowledge of any ASCII-like text encoding -- it is widely assumed the future will use at least Unicode (eg, UTF-16) or better (with some compression scheme perhaps), so this would be considered historical information.
  (UTF-8 is a superset containing ASCII, as is UTF-16, but with 2-byte alignment, such that most common letters leave the high byte or singleton zero, thus 'HELP' in this encoding may appear as random data...)
• Knowledge of the starting offset for capital letters, 0x40 is the character before 'A', 0x41.
• Knowledge of conversion to hexadecimal base from binary -- fairly common knowledge among enthusiasts.

The process would occur as follows, as fast as your character could think it;

• 0100 is 0x4, 1000 is 0x8, 0100 is 0x4, 0101 is 4+1 (0x5), at this point it is more obviously likely to be an ASCII-type encoding than any other format, so this must be the 8th and 5th capital letters, 1100 is 8+4 (0xC), the 12th letter, 1 0000 is 0x10, 16th letter ... 8th, H, 5th, E, 12th, L, 16th, P ... HELP.

Other excuses for knowing that this means 'HELP' would be your in-suit computer decoded it, one of your teammates decoded it (would not likely be an Alien, as ASCII-type encoding is definitely a human-only format), or it is revealed to you later through reviewing your suit's visual log, or immediately through remote monitoring.