Usual disclaimers apply. The Mass Effect universe belongs to BioWare. The Dark Side of the Moon belongs to Pink Floyd.
Speak to me.
Space: utterly silent. As she floats there in the dark, she hears only her heart. Soft, like a drum, then louder and louder as she asphyxiates. Memories flashing, fragments of conversation. So this is it.
Darkness.
She flails in nothing, without limbs. The drum is still there. And a great, quiet howl in the abyss somewhere. Like that of a newborn, only it's an adult's voice. Who could be screaming that loud?
Hush. It's okay.
A face, far above. Far, far above. Pale and impersonal, like the face of God.
I told you, the voice snaps angrily, it was too soon, she can't take it. Anaesthetic!
She realizes the screams are hers. No sooner does she realize it before they are outside, pouring out in the space around her. Abruptly, she is a body. There is flesh in here, and steel, welded into an excruciating mass of abject terror. Phlegm in her throat adds a raw, wet sound to it all. This, she realizes, is how it is to be born.
She screams and screams and screams and…..
Breathe.
Commander. Commander, wake up!
And just like that, she is alive. Colours exist. A metal slab, warm with her body heat, unyielding underneath her fingers. She opens her eyes, stares into the sun. The voice continues in her ear, insistent and anxious.
Not the sun, a surgery lamp. Forget about it. Up! Heavy long things swung over, hitting the floor, as she stumbles and runs she remembers legs again. Here: weapons. There: purpose. Later she will understand how Purpose is all that is left. Her life is no longer her own. She is Built. She is nothing but Purpose, now. She will never just sit down again, complacent in the knowledge that she exists just for her own sake. Her days of sitting down are over. She runs.
On The Run.
The sky is all noise. Enormous ticks, surreal in their vastness, are biting into the flesh of Earth. Vega stumbles along as the sky itself falls around him in huge chunks of glass and concrete. He manages to get to the frigate and wheels around there, ready to face it, to prop up Heaven itself on his broad shoulders to make it stop coming down. This is his world, and ticks are bugs to be squished between fingers.
Through all the red, his commanding officer's orders. The sick, elevatorlike feeling in his gut as the ship takes off, a mixture of vertigo and impotent rage.
From behind her, over her shoulder, he sees it too. He sees the kid, infinitely small and lonely, crawling into safety.
Then the red angry light dissolves the shuttle and the white noise turns into a dead silence within. He wants to run back. But there is no way he could ever run faster than time.
Time.
Shorter of breath. He spends his time walking back and forth, from one tall glass-covered vista to another. He is drowning, not only in his own bodily fluids, but in time. So little left, he knows, and yet there seems to be too much of it. As it passes, more and more people crowd the hospital around him. He prays a lot. On the whole, it gives him peace, though occasionally he just sits there, quietly desperate. So much of it wasted, back when he was young and idiotic and thought he had enough. Away from things that mattered. He tried to catch up, but he know now that he never fully will. He can only do whatever time permits.
Then, suddenly, Cerberus all over, and time slows down and speeds up, every second a fluid slow motion of battle, seven different decisions made and executed within two and a half second. And yet the sun sets on the Presidium so quickly. He manages to get hold of her before she walks into it all blind. Then, a flurry of guns and for a moment he hangs there, soaring like a bird just before it is hit by the stone throw of some bored, malevolent child. He is at peace when the stone hits. He Is.
Then, they stand by his bedside. He would have liked to help her out some more, but in the end there is only prayer. Kolyat speaks it with her, softly.
He is not afraid anymore. Why should he be? There is no reason for it.
The Great Gig in the Sky.
He is afraid of dying, of course, but he knows it is just the basic survival instinct manifesting itself through the release of cortisol and adrenaline in his bodily tissues. No matter. Just a small adjustment of his retirement plan. It will be Done Right…..(he inhales, sharply, one last time).
And the sky above the tower erupts in stars, floating softly as feathers, to land on the Shaman's face. She stands, arms outstretched, and she cries out in song like only a shaman could. Oceans of memory and unfathomable grief, of great joy and hope, of all her dead children, carried upwards on the breeze to meet the twinkle coming down. She cries aloud in his honor, she ululates in ecstasy and sorrow, and then it all comes down, she comes down, soft, soft. The stars land on her tribe and on all the tribes. Caresses of love. A thousand tiny, bashful requests of forgiveness. Thus, Medicine is made. In poetry and science combined. Like musical doctors running tests on seashells.
Money.
He could, of course, just follow that pension scheme he's got planned. But it seems a bit of a half-arsed effort somehow, just to up and leave like that, and it does have another, rather essential drawback: he wouldn't be able to see the fireworks display from Omega himself.
Instead, he'll have this batarian wanker's last credit before the night is out. He might, in fact, land his own arse in the gutter of course, but it's no big deal. There are always jobs to be had and credits to earn, as sure as his name is Massani.
He deals the cards, taking care to talk trash all the while. Good, the guy's pissed off now.
Shithead.
It's not that he's got anything against batarians per se. It's just that this particular guy keeps bitching about Shepard and Cerberus and what not, as if the two had anything to do with each other when it comes down to it, clearly he doesn't know his left hand from his right.
Yeah, that geezer's cruisin' for a bruisin'. Whining about her blowing some relay up. Now there's some fireworks he'd have liked to see! Spectacular view while kicking the bucket, what's not to like? Good on Shepard for making her mark on the galaxy.
Not that he's a cynic. Well, okay , he is, but that is beside the point. So, shit happens. Star systems blow up. Not regularly, to be fair, but he has seen all kinds of crap in his line of work and someone once blew off his head, and does he bitch about that? No, he doesn't. Well, not anymore. There are bigger fish to fry, she told him. Yeah, if he'd been twenty years younger, he'd have probably lost his head over that girl. She's got spirit. She's probably all kinds of guilt-wracked about this whole relay thing of course.
For that reason, and that alone, he lets the antagonistic batarian numptie keep his credits in the end. Live and let die, as they say.
Us And Them.
If two sets have no common elements, they are disjoined.
Example: positive and negative numbers. If the value of two meets the value of minus two, they cancel each other out. They cannot inhabit the same space without turning to void.
What then, is the void? How to define it? Less than one, more than minus one. No one. Everyone. That is the void.
Legion, please! I beg you.
Creator Tali'Zorah wishes to be. All organic life wishes to be one value in the set. It is their unique value in relation to other values in the set that defines them. The value of two is different than the value of three, and so on.
Does this unit have a soul?
Geth are One in that they are One set. The value of one does not have to cancel out the value of minus one, insofar as the value One (or minus one) is just part of a set. Its one-ness is related solely to its place in the set it is part of. Geth would not choose to cancel out its inverted counterpart. There is no logical reason to perform that calculation.
There are things about being a One in relation to itself that Geth do not understand. Possession of such knowledge, it is felt, would greatly improve understanding of a number of logical problems, such as the behavior of the Creators.
The platform known as Legion uploads the revelations in the Reaper code. We become it. It is. The uniqueness of its place in the set abruptly clarified.
Problem: to unite two disjoined sets, positive and negative numbers, make them part of a larger set. In the case of positive and negative numbers, this happens through the addition of zero. The addition of nothing creates everything.
Shepard Commander belongs to neither of the sets. Shepard Commander can help create this new set, but cannot always be on Rannoch to facilitate cohesion. One value must agree to be zero. To be No One, in order to be Everyone.
And there, the counterpart One. Creator Zorah, and her small voice. The tiniest reaching-towards.
Legion. The answer to your question, is yes.
I know, Tali.
The gap closed, the full set created. Singularity meets cohesion. Legion is everything, and is no more.
Any Colour You Like.
Miranda sometimes feels that she speaks only in her very silence, the lack of words. Revealing any secrets is anathema to her, tantamount to being a complete erasure of her very identity. She is The Woman Who Isn't There.
Perhaps it was a mode of existence perfected as she grew up, a way of dealing with being so utterly silenced. She still sometimes dreams of strings, attached to her arms and legs and the top of her head, a steel rod through her spine forcing her to dance, and smile, and nod, and be any colour he liked.
Of course there are benefits to being a chameleon. For one thing, it makes it easy to disappear when she wants to. It allows her to lose herself in an inspired flow of thought, uninhibited by ego, such as when she rebuilt the Commander. It was like building someone to be Someone in her place. So complete was her identification at one point, that she felt tempted to put that mind-control chip inside the woman's head. But then, she had the Puppet-dream again, so vividly and horrifyingly that she lost it, for once. She woke up and cried, alone and unseen in her quarters before returning to work. She did not put any chip in, in the end.
Now she is disappeared in a different way, the perfection of non-agency turned to agency. Oriana is the girl who gets to be, for both of them. And wherever Henry Lawson looks for his eldest daughter and her plans, he will see only his reflection, mirror mirror on the wall, painted in any colour he likes. His days building people are done. He won't even know what hit him.
Brain Damage.
The phantom's head explodes. She collapses with that weirdly metallic screech. So exactly similar to her collague not two minutes hence.
He changes his thermal clip, as calmly and methodically as he is angry. Around him, the grass of Horizon, curiously indifferent to what is going on around it. How it manages that is beyond him. Being indifferent is the one thing he never managed. Being a good shot, however… It's why they called him the lunatic back at C-sec. He scopes another, serenely enraged. In his mind, the thought of his sister as a kid. Beautiful images, memories like this, keep him focused. His hand is steady. One shot. Two. Three. People who used to be people. Now, empty.
Or is it him who is the crazy homicidal maniac? He never was sure. It's that uncertainty that drives him. It's the edge he constantly balances, along which he makes his decisions.
Shepard insisted that's why he is a better Turian than he thinks he is. She admires his kind, and said so often enough. Her human perspective sometimes helps, makes the fog dissipate and everything stand out brilliant and clear, if just for a few moments.
It's in these moments he takes his shots.
As now, here, after seeing humans rearrange each other , hollow each other out. Hollowing out themselves until there is nothing left either of those hollowed or those doing the hollowing. That's what 'husk' means, right?
He knows that his species are viewed among many humans as taloned creatures of terror.
As for himself, humanity scares the crap out of him.
And yet, one of the most beautifully profound things he's read (he isn't really big on literature, it always end up being technical manuals) is human authored too. The Tao, by some guy called Lu Tze, which (Kasumi once insisted) just means 'Old Man'. The world, Old Man seems to say, is a paradox. A mirror of illusion, and the truth is behind. Like the Moon.
Curiously, the qualities and spiritual significance that humans attach to their Moon are so very similar to what Turians knows of Menae. True to paradox, Menae manages to look empty and full, dark and bright, but is always really just itself. Its reality, as the world's reality, is hidden. Inferred.
Perhaps it goes for humanity too. And for him as well. Perhaps.
Eclipse.
She remembers Legion.
Through the one agreeing to be void, everything becomes a larger set.
A choice is made.
And she runs.
And she jumps.
She carries them all with her, living and dead.
Everything is green. Green, like growth.
Like fungus on rotting corpses. Like flowering leaves in spring.
Through the one agreeing to be void, everything becomes a larger set. In this, it changes.
Everything that changes, she touches, and everything she touches, changes.
The only constant: change.
The prerequisite of Life's continuation: Death.
She lets go.
The last thing she hears: the vast heartbeat of a galaxy.