Preface: If you are one of my current readers, you will notice that this story consists of chapters pulled from my fic "Victory." I pulled these chapters from the story to reach out the fans of our two favorite synthetics to contribute something to remove the sour taste in their mouths. Also you'll notice that this chapter's wording is different than the current version of "Victory" and that's because I'm in the middle of a massive revision of the story. I'll continue that story as soon as possible once I post the last chapter of this one. Enjoy and please review.


"What is your opinion about the Geth?"

"Well, I believe they were good allies in the war effort. I mean, when they attacked Eden Prime, many of us thought they were evil machines who were only good at killing people. But after seeing Shepard's interview about them, they were just slaves to the Reapers like all the other people who were indoctrinated by them."

"When my colony was attacked by the Reapers, I ran to the evacuation zone but I was hit in the leg. The Reapers forces were closing in but several geth soldiers came in and held them off. One of the big ones, a prime I think that's what they're called, stood behind me to protect me and another normal sized one grabbed me and carried me to the evacuation zone. They saved my life and won't forget that."

"I do feel pretty bad about the geth dying to be honest. They were misunderstood like many of the other species like the Krogan are. What Shepard said about them made me feel that synthetics can be called people too. I just only wish there was something we could do to bring them back, you know?"

"I feel that they were people like all of us. They may be different from humans and Turians, but they could think and do things like organics can. It just doesn't seem fair that they had to die with Reapers. It might have made our future even better if we had them as our friends after it was over."


The Normandy dropped out of FTL right above Rannoch. Shepard looked to see the view of the planet that was the same as he remembered when he first arrived to the system. The sun shown in the distance on the edge of the planet's horizon illuminating the planet's surface as it rotated. In the shadows of planet's nightfall, he saw lights of settlements that were taking shape across the landscape. They weren't as bright or as concentrated as the lights of settled worlds like Earth and Palavin because of how young the cities were and how very few quarian there were in the galaxy. But it was still a great view to see. Even better knowing that it the people on the plant finally were given something to cure them of their homesickness. After 300 years, they had a homeworld again.

After waking up in a hospital after the crucible was used, Shepard was both relived but also ashamed. Relieved to know that Liara, the women he loved, was alive and by his side when he woke up. But ashamed when he remembered what happened on the Citadel and about his choice to destroy not only the Reapers but all synthetic life, including EDI and the Geth. When he remembered and told his crew when they came to visit him, they were divided about the reality of what happened. As he expected, Joker silently walked out of the room, obviously burdened from the truth about how Shepard deliberately and willingly killed EDI. But James and several of the others felt Shepard did do the right thing instead of taking a giant risk with the other two options of activating the crucible. If he chose to give up his body to take control of the Reapers, would he, the person, be controlling them? Or would an entirely different entity that was based on his mind be controlling them? Or if he chose to leap into the beam to allow the crucible blast to merge organic and synthetic life together, would each species still be unique and distinguishable from the other species? Moreover, would the reapers actually cooperate and do what the species of this cycle wanted or would it be the other way around? It was a lot to think about, but James put it at that Shepard did what everyone wanted, to destroy the Reapers. And that's what Shepard did. But the guilt still lingered. Deeper than the guilt of leaving Ashley to die on Vermir. Deeper than sending the asteroid into the Alpha relay without time to warn the Batarian colonists to get out of the Bahawk system before it was too late.

After being released from the hospital, and after a debrief with Hackett, Shepard accepted his promotion to Admiral. He skipped Captain because under the circumstances, Shepard would have been promoted to Captain for his casualty-less suicide run against the collector base if he didn't wear Cerberus colors at the time. After he received his promotion from Hackett, Shepard met up with Jacob and several more of his crew, past and present, in Rio at the bar Jacob talked about before the final fight. There, Joker sat down with him and straightened things with him about EDI. He forgave him and told him he wanted Shepard to live a happy life with Liara without the burden of him being alone. Shepard accepted it and they joined the group and had a great party together.

After visiting Anderson's resting place and paying his respects, Shepard was given back the Normandy to cruse the galaxy one last time to see what's become of it. The first place was Tuckunka to see how the Krogan were holding up with the Genophage cured. They were doing very well with the help from the Turians and even several of the Salerians. Winks and Kerrahe aided in the cleanup of Tuckunnka's atmosphere while being opposed to the Dalatrass and the current leadership of the Salerian Union. And at the end of the day, Tali had given Shepard a call about a message she received from Rannoch.

When Tali told Shepard about the call, he didn't know what to think about the part that it involved the geth. Did it mean some part of the geth survived the blast from the Crucible? If that were the case, could that mean some of the Reapers probably could have survived the blast too? Either way it was something that Shepard needed to look into right away. After he gathered his crew and said his goodbyes to Wrex, Bakkra and Grunt, he departed with the Normandy to Rannoch. The trip was long jumping through the newly repaired relays to the edge of the galaxy but they finally arrived within several days.

"SSV Normandy we have you on our scanners," the quarian traffic operator spoke over their com. "Is Admiral Shepard and Admiral Tali'Zora on board?"

"We're both onboard," Tali said standing behind Joker's seat next to where Shepard stood. "We've received the message from the Admirals. We're here to see what they needed from us."

"Admiral Xen is waiting for both of you at one of the former geth server facilities. Recommended you use a shuttle dispatch to reach your destination. In the meantime, you may follow the vector to the nearest star port Normandy."

"Roger that. Will proceed with approach vector," Joker said and looked over at Shepard. "Go ahead and figure out what the deal is, Admiral. We'll meet up with you in a little bit."

Shepard nodded and exited the cockpit with Tali following him. They entered the elevator and rode it down to the hanger where Cortez was already ready to dust off. But before Shepard entered the shuttle after Tali stepped in, Liara came up from behind him. Shepard grinned as she proceeded after him into the shuttle and took their seats. The hanger door opened and Cortez pulled out of the bay with the passengers aboard.

"Do you know what this is about Tali?" he said to her as the shuttle descended through the atmosphere.

"I only know that about a week ago an engineering team discovered a geth device that was buried in the ground near one of our newly formed settlements. They unearthed it and they got to work examining it."

"A geth device?" Shepard asked. "Was it functioning?"

"No. Not when they found it," Tali said. "Many circuits were fried but less than all the electrical devices that were caught in the Crucible's blast. That was probably because it was buried in the earth which shielded it from most of the effects of the blast. They said they repaired it easily and its now supposed to be functioning."

"But what's in it?" Liara said. "Is it a functioning geth program?"

"I don't know. Xen might have the answers we're looking for."

Several minutes later, Cortez called out to the passengers. "We're approaching the facility."

The shuttle slowed down and hovered as the doors opened. The air of Rannoch was dry, but unlike Tuchunka, there was no heavy concentration of dust tainting the air. Shepard walked over to the opened door and looked down at the cliff side while Cortez descended. He saw the platform that was built into the cliff and he recognized it was the same one that lead to the Geth fighter server that he and Legion erased. Standing on the platform waiting for him were several quarians. They were still wearing their suits with the face plates on. It was understandable even though the atmosphere was where their biology was shaped from. When the shuttle leveled off, Shepard stepped out onto the platform with Tali and Liara behind him. The female quarian who stood in front of the group came forward.

"Welcome back Tali'Zorra," Admiral Xen greeted her. "And we welcome you back, Admiral Shepard. Under different circumstances, we would have prepared a more formal welcome for you."

"It wouldn't have been necessary, but thank you," Shepard said. "How are your people doing?"

"We've made serious developments with our settlements and our services to the galactic reconstruction have given us a great amount of aid and supplies to help us settle in better. However our progress was slowed down ever since the crucible fired and many of our tools malfunctioned and..." Xen paused and looked down. It was Shepard's cue braced himself. "The geth went offline."

Shepard rubbed the back of his neck when the shame came back to him. But he shrugged it off and put his hand back at his side.

"Tali said you found something a week ago," he said. "A geth device."

"It's more complicated than just the device," Xen said. "If you follow me, you'll understand what it all means and why we wanted you to come here."

Xen turned around and the trio followed her and the other quarians accompanying them. They followed the walkway into the mountainside. When the doors to the facility opened, Shepard saw several quarians spread out over the walkways. Portable CPUs and welding tools were laid out everywhere and the quarians were working extensively at the severs and the terminals all around.

"You've been working on this place for a while?" Shepard asked Xen.

"After the Crucible's blast reached Rannoch, Admiral Korris ordered our engineers to see what was left of the Geth. For the first several months, we've been unsuccessful in finding any trace of any sentient Geth that survived here on Rannoch or any of the salvaged materials the flotilla brought back from Sol. Their weaponry and some of their technology were easily fixed but no geth were functioning. So several weeks ago, Korris asked me to start a project to use the small amounts of fragmented data we managed to recover from geth servers to try to reconstruct the Geth programs that were erased."

Shepard was surprised to hear what Xen said. The quarians were attempting to recreate the Geth from scratch from what was left? Considering what happened the first time their ancestors created the geth and the geth revolted in self defense.

"Weren't many of the quarians wary about you doing this?" He asked Xen.

Xen looked back. "After what you've done for the Flotilla about opening our eyes to how the Geth truly were, mostly everyone followed Korris's statements that we needed to repay them for the contributions they had given us. And the way for that to happen is to give them a chance to live again. I and the other geth experts have used what we learned from the geth to attempt to recreate them. So far we've made small progress."

"Creating a single A.I. can take weeks or months," Liara said. "Several thousand AI would probably take years to create."

"We were wrong about the geth when our ancestors created them and attempted to exterminate them. That mistake caused them to revolt and forced us off our home. After they converted several of their records of their revolt to us, many of us, including me, felt we were the ones who deserved to be exiled. So we believed that the way to redeem ourselves was to recreate them in any way we could even if they wouldn't be the exactly the same as they were before. It will take time but in the end it would benefit the quarian people."

Shepard did feel a sense of accomplishment hearing her say that. It was like the interviews he saw on the extranet after his recovery. Several people said the geth were misunderstood and some even said they forgave them for the damage they've done when they were pawns of the Reapers.

"Wouldn't the council be concerned about you doing this?" Shepard asked. "I know the political machine's in shambles but there are still the laws about creating AIs."

"That law's been talked about to death while you were unconscious," Liara said. "Because of the geth's help, there's been talk about overturning it and allowing research under acceptable circumstances."

"And I suppose this is an acceptable circumstance?" Shepard said.

"It should be at least," Tali said.

"Regardless of what everyone else thinks, we're going to do what we can to let the geth live again," Xen said.

"That's good to hear," Shepard said. "But I'm concerned about what you'll do with them if you manage to pull this off."

"If you're concerned about my earlier statements about bringing the geth back to serve their masters, you don't need to worry," Xen said immediately. "Several quarians who were on their pilgrimage were caught by slavers. Those who managed to escape and return to the flotilla told us about the horrors of their time as slaves. We're better than the Batarians. Indentured servitude will never happen on our world, not even to the geth"

Hearing "Indentured Servitude" gave Shepard an unpleasant kick back to the past. On Illium, he saw a quarian who was about to willingly to give herself to perform indentured servitude to pay off her debts. Shepard couldn't allow that. With his intervention, he got her out of slavery by convincing a Synthetic Insights representative to hire the quarian as an employee while creating a good image for the company of buying slaves then freeing them. Now, after seeing what really happened during the geth uprising, or the mourning war as Legion and the rest of the geth referred to it as, Shepard knew that the geth were no more than slaves to the quarians even though the Geth never saw it as such. He felt relieved that if they managed to pull this off, that the new A.I.s they were attempting to create, or recreate, would not be their servants or anyone else's servants. They'd be their own people, just like Legion and the geth had hoped to be.

Xen lead the group up the platform to where Shepard recognized was the server hub where he entered the geth conscious with Legion. He saw several inoperable geth platforms laying on the floor while several quarian engineers were hard at work mentoring them. Shepard noticed that the platforms were hooked up by cables to several portable CPUs and the server itself. And right in front of the server was what Shepard and Tali were called to Rannoch for.

"Is this the device you found?" Tali crouched down to examine the device. The device was the size of a small crate with an obvious geth design and architecture. The most notable trait was a central glowing light on the front of it that glowed like a geth optic lens did.

"When we unearthed this, a few components were damaged but it was easily fixed. But the amazing thing was that the data that was contained in this is mostly intact even after the crucible's blast reached down into the ground and touched it."

"What kind of data is on it?" Shepard asked.

"We don't know. The data's encrypted heavily. But after examining its design and structure for several days, we've made conclusions that this device's function is essentially that of a Greybox."

A Greybox? Like the device Shepard helped Kasumi retrieve after she joined his crew? A greybox's function was to store the memories of cretin user and could only be accessed by that user or any other user that possessed the correct encryption key. In Kasumi's case, the key was genetic and her key allowed her to access it and relive the memories of her partner in crime and access the information on it that was sensitive to the Alliance. But why was this particular device buried beneath the surface of Rannoch's soil?

"A memory storage device for the geth," Shepard said looking down at the device. "So does that mean that the memories that are stored onto that thing are only accessible by a geth?"

"We assume that might be the case," Xen said. "We haven't been able to find a way to access the information. We brought it here and connected it to the server. After the war with the geth was stopped, this server was repurposed to monitor the development of our settlements. When the crucible's blast came to the planet, the server was wiped clean. We restored the server to working condition and plugged the device in once we repaired it. But not all of the data within the device was blocked off when we examined it. There was one piece of data we could access."

"What was it?" Tali stood up to Xen's level.

"Just a single sentence. A name of someone."

"Shepard's name?" Tali asked.

"No," Xen turned around to the pods that were sitting behind the server. Shepard looked over at the pod brought up to the walkway. What he saw widened his eyes. Inside the pod was a human man.

"Keelah!" Tali was shocked for a second. "Is that...?"

"It's him," Shepard said walking up to the pod.

Inside was none other than David Archer.

"Do you know this man, Shepard?" Xen asked.

"I saved him from an experiment Cerberus was performing with the geth over a year ago. They were trying to find a way to use him to control the geth with his autistic mind. I rescued him and sent him to Grissom Academy. The last time I met him was when I helped evacuate the academy when Cerberus tried to abduct the students."

He looked back up at David. Seeing him in a rather peaceful state didn't remind him immediately about the horrific sight of David in the AI core room. Suspended in the middle of the room with tubes coming out of his mouth and cables preceded through his arms holding them up like he was on the cross that Jesus was crucified on while his eyes were propped open with his tears pouring down his face.

"We contacted mister Archer once we were able to retrieve his name from the device," Xen said. "He told us he knew what needed to happen and he came to the Rannoch as soon as he could. When he arrived, he got straight to work on this server. Even though there are no functional geth, he claimed to have established a link to what's left of the consensus."

"The consensus is still functioning without the geth?" Shepard asked.

"We assumed that everything in the consensus was erased when the crucible was used. But recently with David Archer's intervention the consensus is actually reported to be functioning inside this server."

"If it's functioning, wouldn't that mean that some geth are alive?"

"We've been monitoring the readings but it doesn't match that of a functional geth program. Something is happening inside the server, but it's not a functioning geth. We assume the activity is what David Archer is doing inside the server now."

"How long has he been in there?" Liara said.

"He's been in there for over a week," Xen said. "But in the recent days, he communicated two things to us. He told us to bring repaired geth platforms here and hook them up to the server and the other was to bring you here."

For a moment, Shepard was stunned. The geth greybox device that told the quarians to find David. And David getting right to work on the server and hooking himself into the consensus. The pieces were falling together and Shepard started to feel nervous but excited too. All this made him think about what it all meant and he had a gut feeling about where he fit in all of this.

"Did the message say he needed me to join him in there?" Shepard asked Xen.

"We assumed it did. You were the only other person to have interfaced with geth technology so it seems reasonable that he would have wanted to you join him. But we don't know for sure."

Shepard exhaled and the excitement flowed from his body.

"Can you get another pod ready," he asked.

"Shepard?" Liara grabbed his shoulder softly. "What are you doing?"

"It's okay Liara," Shepard said. He expected Liara to be worried. "I went in there before and came out alive and sane last time."

Liara's face eased the nervousness she had. After getting him back by pure miracle, she didn't want him to take more risks.

"Just be careful," Liara said.

The look in his eyes was like the same look when he made the promise to return from the suicide mission against the collectors. And he kept that promise, so Liara had a feeling that he could keep this promise too. Shepard smiled and gave her a pat on the shoulder before he turned to the vacant pod adjacent to the one occupied by David. The pod door opened and he stepped inside. He turned around to see Liara, Tali, and Xen watch as the pod door lowered down.

"Good luck Shepard," Tali said before the pod sealed shut. Shepard took a deep breath and centered his head. He heard the humming of the pod begin to grow. The humming grew louder as it charged up. Shepard remained still and he closed his eyes just as the holographic interface surged around him distorting what was real. It continued to grow loader and loader and until it ceased.


Shepard opened his eyes. The pod door opened in front of him to show he was no longer in the world of the familiar. But even the unfamiliar world he visited was even more unfamiliar than the way he remembered it. When he entered the consensus the first time, the world he saw looked generic and very organized with shapes coming together to form steps and walkways. He could feel the amount of information that was flowing around him. It felt like every fragment and shape had life to it.

But now the environment was very different than it was before. The generically shaped platforms and shapes that were once organized where now broken into pieces that were suspended in midair. There was hardly any light around him. The only light that Shepard could see was the glow that outlined the broken fragments that swirled around him. All of it felt... lifeless.

But in the distance, he could see a dim glowing light. Like a sun on the horizon only that it had a rather bluish glow. The illumination made him see most of what was in front of him. There was path of cracked platforms that resembled a stairway. It was like the steps of an ancient ruin with several steps shattered and broken. The only difference was that the broken pieces were floating in midair. Shepard moved his feet forward gaining the feel for the environment again. He took slow steps onto the ascending stairs and Shepard walked across path that lead to the glow in the distance.

As he got closer, he made out what the glow was and the area around it. The glowing object was a large translucent orb. Around it was several pieces of the broken platforms scattered around the consensus. But Shepard saw several broken pieces that were put together to form a ring around the sphere. He climbed the steps up to the platform and right in front of him, standing just before the glowing orb, was a silhouette of a human. Shepard didn't see the person's face but he knew who he was. Before long, the human stopped what he was doing and turned around and looked at Shepard.

"Shepard," David Archer said. "You came. Thank you."

"David?" Shepard asked.

"Yes," David had a rather pleasant smile on his face. "I have been here for a time. I have made great progress."

He took a step to the side to reviled what he was moving his hands over. It was another sphere that shared the same design as the large one.

Shepard stepped closer to David and his "project."

"Progress on what, exactly?"

David looked up at the larger sphere, like an artist admiring his work.

"Before you defeated them, the geth reach out to me. They were in danger. They asked me to help them. I accepted."

David turned back to the smaller sphere and brought his hands up to it. His hand moved the sphere around and the pattern shifted on the surface. And above them, the larger sphere mimicked the same motions as the smaller one.

"I connected to them again. Through the connection, they gave me the pieces to help them. When you had defeated them, I would start putting the pieces together. When the quarians found one of the other pieces, it would be time for me to put them together. I came and I brought the pieces to be put together here. With my pieces and the ones they found, it would be completed. But I realize now that I didn't have all the pieces. Only some are missing."

David stopped moving his hands around the sphere and turned back to Shepard.

"A few that can be retrieved now to complete it."

Even though David still spoke in the absent small bits, Shepard had a fair understanding what he was talking about. But the part about the missing parts made him pause for a moment. If David was missing pieces and he called Shepard here, did that mean...?

"Are you saying I have those pieces?" Shepard asked.

"You were the only other who connected to them. A part of them became a part of you. You helped them. And you want to help them again."

David took a step to the side, signaling that he wanted Shepard to walk up to it.

"What exactly am I supposed to do?" Shepard asked.

"Connect yourself to it. The pieces you carry will be put into place and it will be complete."

By "connect," Shepard assumed that David meant to just touch it. After a deep breath, Shepard stepped up to the sphere and looked down at it. Looking down at it made him feel something unusual. After everything that had happened to him and the entire galaxy, he felt a certain acceptance to do things that were unfamiliar to him even if he felt odd about it.

Slowly, he brought his arm up and moved his hand closer to the surface of the object. As he did, he felt a vibration building in his hand that reached up to his shoulder. Shepard hesitated for a second. But he continued to move his hand toward the surface. The vibration grew and stretched to his chest. His hand had made contact the sphere.

Suddenly, his eyes were filled with an array of colors that shifted and changed erratically every millisecond. In that instant, he felt as if his entire mind was shifting outside of his head, like he was receiving another vision from the Prothean beacon on Eden Prime. Shepard didn't know how long it lasted but when his senses came back, he found himself bent over with one hand on the platform he stood on. He leaned himself up and looked to see the sphere was sitting where it was before. But he saw that it now had a red pattern on its surface.

The pattern of the sphere and the new red color shifted across the surface, faster and faster every second. They did so until Shepard recognized the shape of the sphere. It took the form of the Reaper coded geth program Legion had shown to him and Xen prior to his mission to come to the server to deactivate the geth fighters. When the geth program without the Reaper code was shown by Legion, it looked like a geometric nerve cell with electrical surges emerging from its nucleus. When Legion showed ten programs working in unison, the sphere was sending out surges at a quicker rate representing better intelligence. And when legion showed the Reaper coded geth program, it was so much like an organic nerve cell with the electrical surges flowing through organic neural pathways. And right now, the program hovering in front of him was a Reaper encoded geth program.

After a second, the program hovered above him and floated toward the larger sphere standing in the center. When it reached the outer surface, the program dissolved into multiple fragments. The fragments then flowed down to the center and merged form the nucleus of the larger sphere. Within a second the larger sphere morphed to form a large geth program. But it's design was a little different than the Geth program was. The nucleus didn't emit surges that ran through the neural pathways to the surface.

Shepard looked away for a moment to David standing by his side. The look in his eyes looked like he had seen something so beautiful.

"You did it," David said with a smile.

Before Shepard could speak, he looked above to a small holographic shape emerge from above the geth program. It's shape was unusual but Shepard assumed that it represented cluster of information. The cluster came down made contact with the surface of the program.

When it did it dissolved like the small geth program did before. The fragments merged together and ran down one of the neural pathways to the nucleus. After it passed through it, the data ran down another pathway to the surface. When it emerged, it suddenly formed into another translucent sphere, the same one that Shepard saw turn into the geth program.

As soon as the first program emerged, from all around them, Shepard saw more and more data clusters coming from all directions. All of them went into the central program and dissolved into the pathways and emerged as complete programs. While this was happening, the pieces of platforms that were broken were now moving all around them. Shepard watched as pieces whizzed past both of them and come together to form complete platforms. He saw the darkness was lifted and he saw in the distances that light was returning to the entire region. All the broken pieces were forming back together everywhere. All the while, David's eyes were only focused on the large center sphere. Shepard saw several of the newly formed programs float down and land on the platform ring they stood on. One of them landed right in front of the two men. Immediately the program started to morph itself. It changed into several shapes until it took the form of something Shepard recognized immediately.

A second later, the morphed program reclined from its compartmentalized state and stood up on a pair of legs. Shepard saw the others do the same all around him. The one in front of him turned its single optic lens to him.

"Shepard Commander," it said. All the rest looked his way and they all said the same. "Shepard Commander."

Before Shepard could say anything, the floor under his feet started to glow. A circle appeared under him and another appeared under David. He looked over at David again who only smiled at him.

"It has begun," he said before Shepard's vision was blurred with white and he no longer felt his body.


Author's Note: Here's a little tune to go with all the feels I hope I was able to give you before you go on to the next chapter.

watch?v=cDgQNZrW8bA

I'll have the next chapter up by the end of the week. See you soon.