Personal Interests
Shepard's death and revival in Mass Effect 2 have bugged me for some time:you can restore the body, but how do you restore the soul?Then there's the long, drawn-out war that the Reaper invasion will incur, which could last centuries as the previous one did. Obviously there is going to be some sort of deus ex machina of sorts to bring the war (and the game) to a decisive end. Bioware has their scenario mapped out. The following is my own take of what could go down in the conclusion. Contains spoilers and speculations for Mass Effect: Evolution, and parts 2 and 3 of the game.
An encrypted recording by Dr. Charles Wilson, Chief Medical Officer on the Lazarus Project, reveals the reason for his attempt at sabotage: a threat far worse than the Reapers…
WILSON, CHARLES ENCRYPTED AUDIO
LOGIN: \abort
lasso "dud"
access CRBENC57876212.001
WILSON, CHARLES ENCRYPTED AUDIO
LOGIN: dud
….
LOGIN: CHWILSON
PASSWORD: PRUFROCK
CODE CIPHER: CAYCE
VERIFYING…..
CIPHER APPLIED SUCCESSFULLY… DECODING AUDIO….
DECODE COMPLETE
BEGIN PLAYBACK
I'm not really sure why I'm recording this. Guess so I can… try to keep my head straight, which is pretty hard at the moment… considering what I just dug up. Maybe… maybe if I can somehow pull this off and survive, I'll transmit this to the Shadow Broker or anyone else who can comprehend this and understand what was at stake here. People at the lab often whispered and joked about Cerberus and the Illusive Man's… Jack Harper's Great Plan for Humanity and the lengths he'll go to carry it out. We've all heard rumors of the abductions, the experimentations. The genetic horror shows caged up at some of our remote facilities, all for the Manifest Destiny effort to get humanity ready to take its rightful place among the stars. Gallows humor mostly - have to keep yourself going any way you can, even if what you're doing flies in the face of humanity and God. I was one of those jokers until the day I got to see his Plan. I'm not laughing anymore…
The Lazarus Project was a bold experiment. Even I had concerns as to its success, but I mostly kept them to myself. Jack doesn't like "no" as an answer. Neither does his pet bitch Miranda Lawson, who he designated project head. And the subject of this endeavor: Lieutenant Commander Cadrina Ellen Shepard, Alliance war hero and overgrown Girl Scout. The stories they tell about this woman… when she died the whole galaxy wept. And now we were gonna try to bring her back. No pressure, eh? Mr. Illusive Man wanted me to throw a lasso into heaven and pull the freakin' Angel of Elysium herself back down to earth!
Jesus, bringing the dead back to life… sure, you can repair and restore the damaged tissue, substitute cybernetics and synthetics where needed. But it's just cosmetic work of the highest order. Without neural activity… without a soul -let's face it- all you end up with is a pretty, well kept slab of meat. I worked and kept everyone up to speed on my progress. I made recommendations and observations, requisitioned additional materials as needed. Heh, and butted heads with Miranda. She was so superior, so self-assured, but I knew that she was just as scared as I was that this could all be a bust. The Cadrina Shepard that would open its eyes one day may not be the same person that saved the Council. If that were the case, Jack always has a contingency plan or ten in place. Man does not like to lose. Diversifying his investments like a volus stock broker, always guaranteeing some kind of return.
Then one afternoon, about a year or so into the project, the damndest thing happened!
Neural trace readings suddenly increased and spread to higher functions. Muscular activity was detected. Shepard was coming around - she was actually waking up! Luckily, we got her back under quick. She was mostly complete, but she still needed time to "cook." I kept close watch of her brain wave patterns for the next few days. Still in a comatose state, but every now and again there would be a periodic flutter and her eyes would move as if she were in REM sleep. No response to external stimuli, though. Miranda wanted my best guess as to what was happening. I told her that if I didn't know any better I'd say Shepard was dreaming, which was just not possible with the amount of sedatives in her system. Other than these flutters, readings were within the green. Then just after she had reported these findings to Jack, the flutters ceased. There were still some slight murmurs of increased neural activity, but no more eye movement.
I had a tech come by to switch out a terminal that went on the blink where Shepard was being worked on. His name was Sherman. He was an okay kid, little tech wiz Cerberus coaxed into their service. Coding is a hobby of mine. We struck up a friendship in the mess hall and he would share with me all kinds of tips and tricks. He was a real expert and I know he enjoyed having me as his pupil. Kid just needed a friend. He started complaining that his omni-tool was malfunctioning. Mine seemed okay. Part of his duty roster was maintenance of the surveillance equipment and his tool was specially calibrated to test and configure them. Doing a little troubleshooting, he concluded that something in the room was the culprit. I joked that maybe the microphones were on too high, but he didn't think that was funny. He said that this was a different kind of signal, an ultra low frequency carrier wave of sorts he found intriguing. We came up with a scheme – I would arrange for a few technical difficulties now and again so he could have an excuse to swing by, scope out the room and pin down the signal. After a few sporadic days of "glitches," he found the source just as Shepard was experiencing another brain murmur.
The signal… was coming from Shepard!
Sherman wanted a peek under the sheets, but I stopped him. He asked what was done to her, if she had any transmitters implanted. I oversaw the installation of most of Shepard's cybernetics - Miranda wanted a control chip, but Jack wouldn't have it. I told Sherman no transmitters were put in that I could identify. He thought a moment and then whispered, "Nanites… I think the Man's been working some extra voodoo on your patient." As luck would have it, he was scheduled do some maintenance on Jack's private network. Sherman was gonna try to attach a probe into Jack's personal servers to allow for a covert tap into his files. Pretty ballsy of him; didn't really believe in Cerberus – he was just grateful they kept him outta prison. But Jack gave him the creeps, and I figure he was just waiting for a kindred spirit or an excuse to try to get something over on him that was more damaging than just a virus.
The kid came through. He was able to flash-ghost Jack's files. I got an encrypted vid message from Sherman shortly after his tap. He looked real scared and was practically crying. Was he caught? He begged that I use the tricks he showed me to receive and then go over the data he was able to pull without being detected. I wanted to know what he found that freaked him out, but he made no real mention of it. His last words were: "you gotta beat the Devil, buddy… cut the strings… get out the S.O.S… save our souls…"
I never heard from Sherman again. Days after, there were reports of a teenager with his description that tossed himself out an airlock. I did as he asked and was able to download the data. I owed it to him. I needed to know what he found that drove him to suicide.
That's how I learned the Illusive Man's true identity. Illusive Man. Man of illusion, man of trickery.
Jack Harper started out as a hired gun during the First Contact War on some secret mission for the military. The turians found some kind of ancient relic on Shanxi. Jack got zapped by it and suddenly he can read, understand and speak all kinds of languages! But those abilities came at a price – he started having visions of destruction and whispers that the human race was about to become extinct. These whispers would taunt him over the years and they were getting even louder in his head recently. He was trying to discover what this threat could be and commissioned all kinds of research into how he could prepare humanity to combat it and how he could free himself from the whispers. He eventually learned of the Reapers, and that their return was one of many they had carried out over eons. A seemingly endless cycle of destruction…
Phew, gotta stop a moment and breathe... I can see how the pressure of it all made him start to slip… it is some hea-vy shit! But just you wait, heh… it gets even heavier…
After the discovery of Illos there was a mad dash by scientists to secure the prothean artifacts and databanks there. Jack got his hands on some particular writings. Just looked like chicken scratch to me. But he could read that scratch and translate it. It was poetry. Pretty long winded and stilted – I though Shakespeare was hard to understand and he was speaking English! Jack was mighty interested in it, though. There were lots of apocalyptic references and an obscure prophecy about "a soul who will interface between life and death." I wondered who that could be. Kinda sounded like Jack, with those eyes of his. Hell, even Shepard fit the bill. Shepard…
Jack couldn't make much of it either, at first. He could understand the words, but not the meaning. Only the poetry's author or their species could appreciate the references and imagery. The dossier on Shepard claimed she had a "Cipher" in her head that allowed her to decrypt some ancient prothean vision of the last Reaper invasion. It let her think like a prothean…
Jack, you are one… devious… scheming little shit! All those questions you had at the beginning of the project about the physical structure of the brain and how experience might affect the wiring of neurons. That's why you had those nanites placed to modify her cybernetics. That's why Shepard woke up in the lab – you were poking around in her head looking for the Cipher! And you hit the fuck-ing jackpot! Once he had access to the Cipher, using methods gleaned from some failed project on artificial telepathy, he used it to interpret the poems and made notes on the translated texts. He boiled down all that flowery talk into plain language. The poems, when put together, told one hell of story.
The story was there was a huge debate among the remaining prothean scientists on how to deal with the Reapers. There was already something in place they called the Conduit which they hoped could prevent the Reapers from entering the galaxy en masse. But if the Conduit failed, what else could be done? Their war with the Reapers already lasted centuries. And the Reapers were winning. Even if they could eventually turn the tide, the prothean empire was scattered and vulnerable to new threats, they argued. How could they wipe out all the Reapers at once and end the war forever? It was impossibly hopeless, they concluded. Then one scientist, the author of the poetry, spoke up.
He had been tinkering with their communications network, which involved mental transmission of information via beacons. He theorized that with enough power, links can be created between subconscious minds in real time though the beacons forming a vast gestalt computer. One could access this computer through a specially attuned console he dubbed the Interface. His work was already in the advanced stages when the Reapers first arrived and he was forced to abandon it and enter stasis. It was his proposal that his Interface, if it was still functional, could be repurposed into a weapon.
The Interface would basically envelop all sentient minds within its "meta-space" field like a huge net. It can then target and control, or destroy, any minds within that field; even the minds of the all-powerful Reapers. But during the time the scientists were in stasis, the Interface activated on its own. It grew and evolved as minds passed through its framework until it became self-aware. It found a way to sustain itself without the network of beacons that were starting to take damage.
It observed. It documented. It planned.
When the scientists traveled to the Interface and tried to access it, it shut them out. It then spoke directly to their minds and told them that it was not for anyone to use. The power it had accrued to interfere with not only space, but also time, was far too much for any mortal being to wield. But it vowed that the Reapers would be dealt with as the protheans wished, only in the distant future. It first needed time to prepare. It told them that in the future one would come, a being worthy enough to use the Interface and stop the Reapers once and for all. One that would experience both life and death and know their full impact; the Interface would ensure that this being would exist…
The scientists were desperate and in a panic. Maybe poetry was how the author tried to cope with his impending death and the death of his civilization. A computer intelligence with godlike powers? The arrival of a super-being? Far out shit, I thought. Maybe they wanted to activate the Interface and then chickened out, scared that it could backfire on them. But what if the story was true? Leonardo Da Vinci wrote down much of his work in reverse so it could only be read in a mirror. Nostradamus disguised his predictions as poetry. The author must have kept his work a secret in the same way up until that meeting. It was all just too fantastic to believe.
Then I saw the vid.
The footage of Cadrina Shepard, aged ten, in a hypnotherapy session. Choking and struggling while reliving her last agonizing moments before her death in the attack over Alchera. Rattling off her name, rank, serial number and speaking of events that didn't happen. Things that were yet to happen! Her parents had brought her to a specialist due to episodes of "night terrors." She would act out in her sleep - they may have been memories from her future life - and then awaken with absolutely no recall of what happened. The terrors stopped after that session and she was able to go on with her carefree young life. The doctors couldn't make any sense of what took place, so they just marked her case classified and filed it away.
You could dismiss it as hokum; repressed emotions finding expression in nightmares. Or a rare case of true precognition that, which I'm sure, got Jack's attention in his research on Shepard. But in light of everything else I uncovered, my head began to swim. And then an atom bomb went off.
Jack's willingness to spare no expense to fund the Lazarus Project and his faith in my procedures. Why he was absolutely convinced Shepard could be brought back exactly as she once was, with her mind completely intact.
It all became clear. The Interface exists!
She must have used it, she's going to use it - it's the only explanation! And Shepard can lead him right to it! She was somehow able to back up her mind and store it into her own mind in the past! I don't think she realized that it might be compromised. Jack's interference here in the present may have been responsible for her memory leaks.
No need for a control chip in Shepard's brain – it's in her damned implants! The same means he used to access the prothean cipher can also hijack her motor functions at his command, I'll bet! But he won't yank her leash too soon, no. He'll let her think she has control… at first. Then she'll somehow learn of the Interface's existence and be forced to seek it out of her own free will. She'll have no choice – without it, she could never have come back at all no matter how completely we restored her body! And when she activates it, Jack will make his move. God help every last one of us if he gains control of the Interface! The absolute power he'll have! Our thoughts won't be our own anymore… and we'd never know it!
Damn it! All that work, blood and sweat to pull off the greatest miracle of medical science and now I have to destroy it! What a goddamn waste! I feel sorry for you, Shepard… I really do. You were… the best of us. You were our last hope. Heh, you once joked in an interview about how you felt like you weren't really in control of your own life sometimes. My poor dear… you have no idea how right you were. You may have opposed Cerberus in your previous life, but the "Illusive Man" has you in his corner now whether you like it or not. Shame - you really could have used the Interface to save us all. But in locating it you'd only play right into Jack Harper's hands. I know you don't want to be responsible for raising him to godhood anymore than I do. There is only one sure way to prevent all this from happening. But if I succeed, she won't use the Interface… and I wouldn't have found that vid of her remembering the future, would I? This could mess up the whole damn space-time continuum… fuck space-time, I can't let Jack win! I have… to try! But I can't just make a direct attempt…
I think… I can arrange for a distraction.
Heh, heh, heh… in a sick way… the Reapers do preserve life. They only come in to wipe out the most advanced species that could pose a threat to them, or everything else for that matter. Then they skip back out into dark space and allow life to renew. Maybe there'll be a few survivors; always are after any cataclysm or catastrophe. If not… we've had a pretty good run. But only we can appreciate it. Nobody will remember our successes… or our failures. Probably just as well.
For the good of Shepard's soul. For the good of all the souls that exist and have yet to exist… Shepard has to die…
END OF AUDIO
Author's Notes and Thoughts:
- I needed an aspirin after setting down this story! I tried my best to account for stuff I saw in the games and read in the comics– even then I may have messed up on some points.
- Mass Effect 2 mentions how some stars were aging rapidly due to dark energy fluctuations – the Interface trying to draw energy to power itself?
- The Illusive Man sinking in all that money just to resurrect Shepard and not have any sort of controls in place? Come on - the Man's always playing the angles. He's got to have something in mind…
- Mass Effect 3 has Cerberus – and Illusive Man - being controlled by the Reapers. I'm interested in how the game resolves the final battle with them. The story I had in mind has the Man in an epic game of chicken with them, trying to coax them into the Interface trap with the temptation of their becoming gods themselves, all while trying to free himself from their control.