CHAPTER ONE - MISS TAKEN IDENTITY
"...which means that all the Banshees that were accounted for have been interred at the various Asari encampments on Earth and are gradually being shipped off-world. QEC comm packets and overall reports indicate that of all the husk forms, Banshees are the most cooperative - probably a leftover from the rather specific upbringing most Ardat-Yakshi receive if they agree to a life of celibacy."
The Salarian delegate to the Allied Fleet Command looked up from his notes, pausing to take in the faces of the Fleet Commanders - Admiral Han'Gerrel vas Neema for the Quarians, Geth Prime 451705 for the Geth with Quarian Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay serving as its consultant on non-geth communications, Admiral Stephen Hackett for the humans, Primarch Adrien Victus for the Turians, Pirate Queen Aria T'Loak for the Terminus Fleets, Urdnot Wreav for the Krogans and Captain Ka'Hairal Balak for the Batarians. The Asari representatives had missed the third meeting in a row, and the united Hanar-Drell force has moved out-of-system in pursuit of a possible interim colonization world to at least temporarily set down while the Charon Relay was being repaired. The Reapers split their forces unevenly, leaving some behind to collect the debris remaining in-system and to repair the Charon Relay with it while the rest would move at their own pace towards the other relays, trying to most efficiently reconstitute the relay networks. Even then, with the most optimistic projections, 50% restoration would only be achieved in a couple Earth years, and full network operation would probably take three times that long due to how spread out some of the relays were.
"We've also uncovered that the Reapers were preparing designs for husks of the other races - Salarian, Quarian, Elcor. We're still trying to figure out where the production facilities were located, as they haven't brought any of them to Sol and with most of our fleets being land-locked around Earth, it's not that easy to look for them," he continued, pausing occasionally to restore his breath, "And they're not willing to share that information directly. If anything, our benevolent gods aren't as benevolent as they make themselves out to be," he finished, putting the datapad down.
"Thank you, Emissary Katru," Admiral Gerrel said before turning to the other members of the AFC, "So, even despite forcing this lasting peace on us, they still treat us as underlings? I'm surprised there haven't been any indicents yet."
"Incidents?" the Geth Prime asked with what sounded like caution. Shala'Raan raised her hand slightly as if wanting to say something intrusive, but thought better of it and chose to see where this would lead.
"Give it up, Gerrel," Hackett said gruffly, "Nobody's stupid enough to even try shooting at the Reapers, not after we've learned that Indoctrination works differently on our new synthetic forms," he went on, almost snarling when he said 'indoctrination', "It's a miracle the Reapers themselves are being this polite already."
"They're not polite, just pragmatic," Aria chimed in, smug as always, "They know more about our new state more than we can probably ever hope to, and they simply don't need the nuisance of shooting at us again, not if the rumours are true."
"You mean the ones about their sludge turning sentient on them?" Balak asked. Everyone turned to look at him, as the Batarian's presence on the Fleet Command was barely tolerated - even the Quarian Special Projects fleet was larger than his, and truth be told, nobody except for Aria liked the man himself, xenophobic warmonger that he was. "From my understanding, instead of a unified conscience, the Reapers are now... well, like the Geth used to be before. You know. Before," he repeated, making a vage gesture around his head, implying their upgrade to full-scale AI status. Everybody was dancing around the issue of the Geth and their rising self-conscience, including the replacement of the word "organic" - as mostly inapplicable in the new situation - by "non-Geth", as the only other synthetic race in the galaxy were the Reapers, and not many called them synthetic even before the Crucible was discovered.
"Yes, those very ones, Captain," Aria replied sweetly, probably enjoying the irritation this caused to the other members of the meeting. Unlike Balak's, her pull was substantial, between the ships, the troops and the embargo on drugs and other illicit wares that she helped enforce during wartime to keep the troops of the other races as "clean" as possible. None of that mattered now, but the respect lingered. Aria was a force to be reckoned with, and in an open confrontation between the Command members, it would probably be down to a standoff between her and Wreav, one that the Krogan would undoubtedly eventually win.
The War Room's doors slid open with a hiss, letting in two figures - a Quarian and a Geth. They looked oddly alike, even in coloration - between the Quarian's dark-grey-and-black envirosuit and the Geth's black-and-dark-red, they looked like they came out of the same production line of mechanical humanoids. Most of the former organics found the evolutionary path of the New Geth somewhat offputting, as their desire to be less different from their Creators led them to make their designs resemble the envirosuits more and more. Some Geth were even experimenting with projecting holographic simulations of Quarian-like faces on their "faceplates", but those were few and far between.
"Admiral Xen? To what do we owe this honour?" Admiral Hackett asked with a slight hint of amusement. While he could more easily relate to Han'Gerrel, Daro'Xen was the one member of the Quarian Admiralty that he hated the least - she, at least, seldom hid her true intentions behind politics and the backs of others. If there were dirty deeds to do, she did them herself. She seldom lied, manipulated or went back on her word, and even then, never denied doing so. In short, Han'Gerrel was a politician's soldier, and Shala'Raan was a politician's politician while Daro'Xen was a soldier's mad scientist. For a soldier's soldier like Hackett, that meant a lot.
"There's been a new development with the Geth Consensus, as Kyth'rri here informs me," Xen began, indicating the Geth platform that followed her into the room, "She has brought some interesting facts to my attention."
The room fell silent for a moment, even more silent than before, with the exception of the Quarians' cycling envirosuits and the Geths' occasional whirr or creak of mechanisms, as everyone processed the avalanche of implications behind Xen's words. Aria smiled mischeviously, looking at Xen, then shifting her gaze to the other Quarian Admirals present. Clearly, this was much more of a shock to them- and not only them.
"Pardon, development in Consensus? Why was not informed?" the Prime asked, vocally, in a surprising manner. Its tone was neutral - not all the Geth had mastered inflections yet - but it was obvious that it was less-than-pleased with the way things were going. The Geth Consensus was the unified hive mind that connected all the Geth into one giant network - but its role was changing after the Reaper upgrades turned each Geth runtime into an individual, with free will, independant free thought and an intelligence level that didn't require at least five of them to network together in order to be able to solve something more complex than a quadratic equation.
"Forgiveness, Prime Unit," the Geth introduced as Kyth'rri replied with what sounded like shame, "Received uplink from Consensus, carried out instructions instantly, no time for interface, as ordered." She followed her words with a burst of static that everyone recognized as Geth code - even with the cybernetic enhancements, nobody present in the room could quite comprehend what it contained - and that seemed to change things.
"Acknowledged. Proceed," the Prime relented, flexing back from the openly aggressive stance it had assumed.
"If you'll permit another question, Admiral," Shala'Raan interjected before Xen or Kyth'rri could say anything, "But... A Geth with a name? And did you call it 'she'? Didn't you yourself subscribe to the idea that the Geth were merely tools?"
"That was before, Raan, before we became like them. We cannot be Creators if we are no different from them, and now that they're fully sentient, they are free to choose their names and what to do with them. Kyth'rri is-"
"-a name from the ancient myths, I'm aware," Raan nodded.
"Yes. And that is a female name. Self-determination includes the ability to identify as whatever you please," Xen explained, her tone similar to the one used to explain something to a backwards child, "Can we please move on to the actual news?"
Stacy crinkled her nose at the instructions. Detain by any means necessary. That sounded like police work, not something a hospital nurse should be doing. The mysterious woman with a man's name didn't feel completelythere - not a sensation that Stacy could describe at length, but not dissimilar to Mrs. Stevenson's issue with her potted plant. Perhaps the transformation into cybernetic organisms changed something in the sensory input? Added a seventh sense? (It was seventh as Stacy was convinced that the sixth one existed and was reserved for sexual energies - therefore concluding that the Asari were in full control of theirs in order to be able to manipulate any member of any race into liking them).
"How long did they said it'd take?" the woman asked. Again. There seemed to be a problem with her short-term memory, because she kept asking the same questions as if she didn't get any answers to them. Long-term memory seemed to be functioning more or less okay - she remembered having made that weird call, for example, and she did it from the hospital.
"A few hours, maybe," she replied vaguely, looking back at her datapad. She still used it ever after the transformation - some called it The Shift, some called it The Change, a few of the more morbid types insisted it be called Synthesis, the doomsayers tried to call it The Reckoning, but none of them could adequately explain how being turned into a living machine was supposed to reckon anything. Not because she couldn't quite grasp the new data-processing abilities which people said they now all had - though she really couldn't - but because it gave her comfort that at least some things hadn't changed. In the chaos of the transition, finding any beacon of stability was a relief.
The problem was, the Change also effected a lot of, well, changes. Blood was no longer blood - although chemically it remained almost the same, it now functioned primarily as a coolant for the biosystems of the new techno-organic construct, with a retained secondary purpose of filtering contaminants from the organs. Oxygen transmission was now unimportant as the cells no longer required it - and therefore, the lungs were now rudimentary buoyancy devices at best.
"Good. Not sure if I can wait any longer," the woman said glumly, "This isn't my body, you understand."
"Of course it isn't," Stacy agreed, half-listening, trying to make heads or tails of the weird results the CAT scan made of the woman's head. MRIs were no longer an option - the magnetic fields played hell with the modified nervous systems of all the organics, so apparently they were now little more that huge piles of absurdly expensive obsolete junk that took up a lot of space and ate a lot of electricity.
The holorepresentation of her brain was a messy tangle of whatever it was that neurons turned into with the Change, and not that indicative of anything in particular. The sad truth was, modern medicine was all built around knowing what the various bits and bobs in a body did and what they were made of. An overnight change in both pretty much swept the legs out from under every doctor in the world. No, scratch that, in the entire galaxy!
"You... don't believe me, do you?" the woman called Shepard asked curiously, tilting her head on the side. It caused her asymmetrical haircut to fall down on her eyes, drawing an exasperated sigh from her, "And that's why I never grew my hair out."
Both of the women turned to face the ward door as it opened, letting in one of the hospital's doctors - Mark O'Reilly, trauma surgeon, womanizer, charades mastermind and overall friendly chap. He flashed a trademark smile at them - it looked slightly off because of the greenish hazy glow that the Change brought to everyone's, well, everything. Stacy smiled back, but the mystery woman only raised a quizzical eyebrow.
"Everything alright with our- patient?" Mark asked, taking the offered datapad from Stacy and taking in her half-certain shrug in response. He flicked through the readouts, admitting to himself that he was mostly putting up appearances. While his actual task at the hospital suffered the least from the Change - people still got hurt, and bones could still be set and stitches made and dislocations replaced, and flesh still apparently healed, somehow - taking patient vitals was a nightmare. Pulse as an indicator no longer existed, brainwave activity shifted to different frequencies which were still being rediscovered by trial and error, blood chemistry was altered into unrecognizability, and tying in any and all alterations in it to actual maladies and conditions would probably take months, if not years. And that all just working off the assumption that all the old ones stayed the same and didn't mutate in their new cozy electronic realm.
"So, uh, how do we... address you?" he asked warily, looking up at the woman. "I mean, until your identity is confirmed by whoever it is the Alliance is sending over and-"
"Shepard will do, I think," she replied sternly. "And doctor-"
"Yes?"
"Whatever this body might look like, it's not mine. I'm a man. Smile at me like that again and we might have a problem."
The trip itself was rather uneventful. Looking at the viewscreen showed her only debris that the various ships skittering to and fro - human, Quarian, Geth, sometimes even Reaper - were collecting and depositing in the multitudes of freighters - predominantly Quarian - for recycling and possible recovery of salvageable parts. Karin Chakwas leaned back in her seat, closing her eyes, letting her mind turn inwards on itself and the various entertaining thoughts that were rattling inside her skull ever since that call came in.
She was going to meet Shepard. Who was not dead. At least according to this weird call - some woman in London got imbued with Shepard's memories right during The Event. This opened a huge can of worms, one undoubtedly already being explored by the Salarians and Quarians in their usual "tampering with things best left untampered with" mode that had already led to the creation of the Krogan Genophage and the Geth.
All of this made no sense. So far, there was no indication that the mind got digitized along with the body. Her own thought processes and memories felt pretty much the same as before, and she was certain that this was the first time she had ever heard of it happening - and as what amounted to Chief Royal Medic of the High Court of the Systems Alliance (as one of the techs suggested yesterday, it earned him a wry grin and a smack upside the head from Admiral Hackett, who was defined as the King-Emperor, Guardian and Protector of the Realm of the Systems Alliance) she knew pretty much everything that got put on the Extranet that had anything to do with medical developments in light of The Event.
As such, a bunch of Russian medical students already kitbashed a firmware upgrade for omni-tools - for now, only Serrice ones, but they're working on porting it to the other companies' tools day and night - that would let the user tap into basic bodily functions of the wearer. It was mostly proof-of-concept, but for a technology that was less than a week old, being able to control your heart rate without any implants by simply activating a button on your omni-tool was a pretty decent Hello World. This morning she already saw the subscriptions to their Extranet page skyrocket - there were already externally-made modules of varying usefulness. One Japanese programmer figured out several access points and quickly coded a fresh function for the program - orgasm at the press of a button. However, this was all ultimately beneficial - crowdsourcing would help figure things out and field-test them in relatively controlled conditions of people trying to one-up each other, saving time and money for the scientists and specialists that were supposed to put all of that to good use in saving people's lives.
After all, theoretically, such a program was a godsend for any doctor - being able to pause and restart the heart at the press of a button. Checking readouts of the brain, the heart, muscle functions, just by accessing the person's omni-tool. The potential was limitless... As was the possible harm.
And one living example of the possible harm was waiting for her in London, feeling who knows what, stuck with an unknown amount of Shepard on top of some other person's memories, personality, hopes and dreams... and to make matters worse, it just had to be a woman.
"So, let me get this straight-" Doctor McAllister, the only surviving psychologist in the hospital's employ, asked incredulously, "-you're Commander Shepard, or at least his memories, somehow downloaded into the brain of this poor woman?"
They moved Shepard to the hospital's canteen to free up the ward - a building collapsed not more than two blocks away from the hospital, killing two people and injuring seven, all of which were ferried into the hospital, straining its already-depleted staff even further. As the rush died down and the new arrivals were settled in, Shepard became the centre of attention for the unoccupied staff. Not because of who he was, but because of what she represented. A new, unexpected and highly interesting development of the Change - that minds and memories were little more than digital data, to be stored and transferred and copied and that opened the door for the scariest question of all. Are we more than just our memories and experiences put together?
"Susan Davies, according to her ID," Shepard replied, still flinching every time he (she?) spoke, jolted by the disconnection of the expected voice and the one that actually spoke out loud. "Basically, it's as if someone overwrote Susan with Shepard, but didn't do too good of a job - I can remember being both of them, but there is more of Shepard than of Susan."
"So that is why you identify as Shepard, as a man?"
"Yes. If I were still human, I would assume that Susan was somehow still in here, but... That's not how it works now, is it?" The exasperation in his/her voice was palpable.
"We honestly don't know," McAllister admitted, "Which is why we're hoping that whatever is happening to you could shed some light on the new human condition."
"Are we even human at this point?" O'Reilly asked, walking in, his scrubs stained with blood - the new kind, which quickly grew pitch-black and solidified when exposed to air. He didn't look particularly happy about whatever it is that went down in the operating room, staring at the soda machine with a frustrated look. "Because soda certainly tastes a lot different from what it used to. Is it because it Changed too - or because our Change was too drastic and screwed up the taste buds?"
"Not the only thing it screwed up, it seems," McAllister added glumly, "Food is weird. I need a lot less to feel full now, and don't even get me started on what happened to most of it," He paused to shudder, "I used tolove yoghurt. And now-"
He was interrupted by the entrance of two uniformed men - armed, but their guns were holstered - accompanying a woman in the spacer version of a lab coat, whose name tag identified her as a Dr. Chakwas.
"I was told I could find the woman that called herself Shepard here-" she began, pausing to realize that the room only held one woman other than herself.
"Dr. Chakwas," Susan/Shepard said, getting up, "You're a sight for sore eyes."
"That remains to be determined... Commander," Chakwas replied, visibly trying to remain impassive and failing, "We have to officially confirm your identity."
"How do you propose to do that? Quiz me on everything I went through? I can save you the trouble-" Shepard began, taking a tentative step forward.
"Commander. Not in front of civilians," the doctor reprimanded, "Gentlemen, could you find us a room where we could be left alone for a while? Preferrably one that is not on the main throughfare, as I see the hospital is rather full today."
"I think your best bet for that right now would be the morgue, ma'am. Hardly anyone stays there more than necessary to deposit a body ever since... You know," O'Reilly replied, trying and failing to contrive a way to say "Change" without sounding like a little scared kid or a religious nut and managing to sound like both at the same time because of it.
"The morgue it is, then. Lead the way."