Character from Mass Effect by BioWare
Short-lived amphibian hyper-intelligences who think faster than any other species and have an unsettling willingness to make consequentialist calls on everyone else's behalf.
Salarians live approximately forty years. This shapes everything about their culture: they move fast, make decisions fast, commit to projects fast, and have a relationship with long-term consequences that is genuinely different from longer-lived species. They invented the genophage. They consider this a proportionate response to a resource-competition problem. Most other species have feelings about this. The Special Tasks Group is the salarian intelligence and black operations service: covert surveillance, political intelligence, technological sabotage, and the occasional genophage. Mordin came from there. His arc is the salarian species's arc in miniature: smart enough to do enormous damage, consequentialist enough to justify it, and eventually confronted with the full cost of their reasoning.
Slim, large-eyed amphibians with elongated heads, two-chambered stomachs that metabolize food almost immediately, and a baseline metabolic rate that makes human conversation feel slow to them. They move quickly and talk quickly and think quickly. A salarian at rest still looks like it's processing something.
Also known as: Salarian, Salarians, STG