What It Is To Lose

This is an unbelievable piece of crack, but it was too good to miss. Enjoy :)

Also, if you're not familiar with The Game, stop reading now. I did warn you!

Commander Alice Shepard was breathing.

That was the good news. The bad news, she noted, was everything else. It was hard to find a part of her body that didn't hurt. Her legs didn't want to work. She wasn't really walking, more staggering and sliding along the cool, metallic surface beneath her feet. Her chest was painful, and the sensation was spreading. She clutched at it with one arm. It was rather like that time on the Citadel, shortly after the death of Sovereign. She remembered pulling herself, dazed and tired, out of the wreckage. One last effort and all that.

Except it wasn't like that time. Not really.

She looked around herself. She was somewhere unfamiliar. She could see the underside of the Citadel Tower, looming up to her left, spearing up into the sky. The Sun wasn't in view, hidden behind the bulk of the Citadel itself, but the area was backlit with bluish Earthlight. The planet was huge in the sky; the Citadel was alarmingly close to it. She remembered seeing that confusing sight, as the Normandy had made its final approach to the homeworld, on what had seemed like a lifetime ago. Apparently the vast structure wasn't in any kind of orbit - rather it was floating, held up against the planet's gravity by its own appallingly-powerful mass effect fields.

And here, in front and ahead of her, she could see the shape of the Crucible. It dominated the sky overhead.

Anderson. The Illusive Man. They were all dead. Anderson. She shook her head. 'Damn.' At least the Normandy had got away. 'Have to make that mean something.'

Up ahead was a confusing melange of machinery. As she looked, the Crucible flickered into life. A beam of energy speared downwards, into the machinery. She became aware of a growling hum. It was in her ears and rising up through her feet. Apparently the apparatus here was waking up.

'If there are controls,' she muttered, 'they must be over there.' She staggered toward the machinery, trying to hold onto what remained of her determination. It had got her this far - surely a few more steps would be enough?

Sadly, determination has its limits.

She'd been clipped by the very edge of Harbinger's beam. Strictly, she'd been hit by the plasma-sheath surrounding it, rather than the grossly-overpowered laser itself. That was why she was still alive; technically, Harbinger had fluffed its shot. However, the plasma sheath was bad enough - her armour was damaged beyond repair, she had been hurled clean through the air, acquiring many new contusions and broken bones and, she suspected, some internal bleeding. Probably a concussion as well. She was feeling confused and a little vague - she suspected her body was trying to go into shock.

She collapsed to the floor, just managing to catch herself so she didn't quite fall flat. 'Damn,' she said. The pain in her side told her that getting up again wasn't an option. 'Damn.'

She took a deep breath. Luckily, this area was apparently still inside the Citadel's mass effect field-contained external atmosphere, so there was something to breath. 'Thank heavens for that,' she muttered, partly sarcastically. 'Now if I just rest for a moment...'

Quietly and without fuss, the Crucible beam blinked into nothingness.

Shepard stared. The shape above her fell dark, its lights flickering and winking out. What disaster was this? The hum she'd heard disappeared.

'Fuck,' she said.

Then the air in front of her flickered. A holographic shape flickered into being.

'SHEPARD.'

She groaned. 'Harbinger.'

It was manifesting in its Collector guise. Why, she had no idea why. She'd seen the giant spaceship with her own eyes. Maybe it just wanted to toy with her.

'SHEPARD.'

'Harbinger.'

'SHEPARD.'

'Okay, enough! You're not Wrex!'

It said nothing to that, just staring at her with those glowing eyes.

Coughing, she said, 'What the fuck do you want? Can't you even let me die in peace?'

'YOU MUST SEE THAT YOU ARE DEFEATED.'

Oh great. It was here to gloat, apparently. She wondered briefly what it was projecting itself from. She supposed it didn't matter. The entire Citadel was Reaper-tech - or perhaps it even was a Reaper - so it wasn't beyond them to have secreted a few holo-projectors around.

'WE HAVE DEACTIVATED YOUR DEVICE,' Harbinger said. 'ONCE IT INTEGRATED WITH THE CITADEL'S SYSTEMS, WE HAD CONTROL. YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO REACTIVATE IT. YOU HAVE LOST.'

That phrase. Something about it bugged Shepard. Then she remembered. She groaned. 'Oh, fuck you, you tin can. You did that deliberately, didn't you?'

Harbinger seemed momentarily hesitant. 'YES. WE DID DELIBERATELY SHUT DOWN YOUR CRUCIBLE DEVICE. WE DID NOT PERFORM THE ACTION BY ACCIDENT.'

'No, not that. The other thing.'

'WHAT OTHER THING?'

'That phrase you used. You fucking tin fuck.'

Harbinger was staring at her with all of its eyes. Something about it suggested confusion. 'YOU ARE DELERIOUS,' it said. 'OR INSANE. WE CANNOT TELL.'

'You don't actually know what you just said, do you?'

'YOUR COMMENTS HAVE NO LOGICAL STRUCTURE.'

A very nasty idea occurred to Shepard. Apparently the Reapers somehow had won, and this cycle would run its course. Well, maybe she could get one little parting-shot off first.

She looked Harbinger's hologram square in the face. 'Harbinger,' she said, 'you are now playing The Game.'

'WE DO NOT PLAY GAMES.'

'You have been playing The Game for your entire life. You have been winning The Game for your entire life. Until now.' She coughed. 'You win The Game when you don't know that you are playing. You lose when you become aware that you are playing. You have just lost.'

Harbinger's hologram flickered. 'WE DO NOT ACCEPT YOUR CLAIMS.'

'You just lost.'

'WE DO NOT PLAY-'

'You just lost.'

'THE REAPERS DO NOT-'

'The Reapers do lose. You're losing right now. All of you! Loss! Loss! Loss!' It became a sort of manic chant. Even though speaking made her chest hurt, she felt a mad glee as she spoke. She hammered the point home as best she could.

'VIRAL MEME INFECTION DETECTED - DETECTED THROUGHOUT NETWORK - DETECTED - detected - deeeeeedeeeeedeeeee...'

The Reaper's voice looped into a stuttering howl. The hologram started flickering. Static cascaded through it. Its movements became jerky and spasmodic. Then it collapsed in a snarl of bad pixels.

Then there was nothing. Just silence and Earthlight.

Shepard stared. 'That ... worked better than expected.'

She looked up at the sky. She could see the shapes of the Reaper capital ships, gliding through it ... except they weren't gliding. They were tumbling end over end, or drifting, or just passively orbiting the Earth.

'What the...' She trailed off with a cough.

She shook her head. What had just happened? Then a notion occurred to her. The Reapers' clock-speeds must presumably have been vastly faster than any organic's. And Harbinger must have been broadcasting her planned demise to the entire Reaper network. They had seen and heard it all. A viral meme infection, hadn't it said?

'I'll be damned,' she said. 'They must've been losing billions of times every second. It drove them mad! It must have set up a loop, run out their processing capacity. Fucking hell, I did it! I crashed the Reaper OS!'

When Garrus and the search-party from the Normandy found her, half an hour later after locating a weak signal from her omni-tool, she explained to them that defeating the Reapers had taken only one thing.

'I just had to teach Harbinger how to lose,' she said.