The Citadel - October 8th, 20182
"Well... what about Shepard?"
Admiral Steven Hackett stopped pacing at the word as a flood of documents flittered across his field of vision, momentarily blinding him to the real world. The first window to open was a list of high ranking officers by the name "Shepard", but there weren't many people Udina could be referring to.
"She grew up in the colonies," Udina went on, reading through the records displayed on his terminal. They were the sanitized, civilian-approved version of the same records Admiral Hacket and Captain Anderson were seeing now in their heads, "Twenty seven years old, N7 rating..."
"She knows how tough it can be out there," Anderson said, "Her parents were killed when slavers attacked Mindoir."
Shepard - Lieutenant Commander Shepard - was the newly appointed executive officer of SSV Normandy. Her service record flickered across Hacket's vision for a few moments, but the Admiral knew Shepard's story already. "She saw her whole unit die on Akuze. She could have some serious emotional scars."
Anderson shook his head, "Every soldier has scars. Shepard's a survivor."
Ambassador Udina scrolled through the rest of the service record, scanning the man's accomplishments and achievements. Aside from her N7 rating, the woman specialized as a combat engineer; in field deployments in her early career, she showed a remarkable aptitude for electronic warfare, particularly in disabling enemy sensors and shields. Thanks to the neural implants that came with her N7 training she'd also shown a remarkable talent for what the defense contractors were calling "distributed combat," and "individual force multipliers," either of which were just buzzwords for combat drones and AI warfare. Put another way: Shepard could attack an enemy from many directions at once, projecting her awareness into combat drones, infiltrating enemy tactical systems, or even directing fire support from orbit as easily as a normal person might scratch an itch. There was something a little creepy about this new generation of warfare the N7s were unleashing on the universe, and it was made all the worse by the fact that these new tactics were only new for humans.
There was a battlefield record of a clash with a platoon of Salarian mercenaries in the Attican Traverse - the Eclipse, as they called themselves - in the weeks following the Skyllian Blitz, in which Shepard successfully hacked the IFF protocols of a half dozen combat mechs and sent them into a fratricidal rampage against her opponents. Later, on Akuze, she'd survived an attack by ravenous thresher maws by remote-operating a pair of Klondike APCs and using them as decoys. Everything about her service record told a story of resourcefulness and studied calm under pressure. And yet...
"Is that the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy?" Udina asked, shutting off his display. The service record could only tell him so much; it was the opinion of the Navy's leadership he really cared about.
Admiral Hacket looked indecisive, and shot a glance at Anderson as if to say 'Ball's in your court.'
Captain Anderson picked it up in an instant. "That's the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy."
Udina, for his part, had his doubts. But the list of prospective candidates for the new program was already stunningly short, and the fact that Shepard was on it at all spoke volumes. "I'll make the call."
In the year 2148, explorers on Mars discovered the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts revealed amazing new technologies mankind had never imagined before. Force, mass and energy could now be exchanged one for the other at the touch of a button. New materials, once thought impossible, could be developed with ease. New medicines were developed that could extend life or mend even the most life threatening injuries. New computers, new weapons, no tools for scientific exploration. New ways were found to enhance human beings with abilities far beyond what nature could provide. And at long last, humanity gained the ability to travel faster than light, extending its reach even to furthest stars.
The basis for this incredible new technology was a force that controlled the very fabric of space and time. Engineers called it the Newtonian Conversion Field. Archeologists called it the Great Prothean Invention. Journalists and politicians called it the greatest discovery in human history.
The civilizations of the Galaxy Call it
The Mass Effect