Rubble rained down, crushing the bed. There were large gaps of silence in between twisting chasms of death and crushed earth. Noah tried to scream, but eventually nothing came out except a little trickle of blood and maybe a wheezing cough.

A sharp tipped object was pressed hard against his spine. He assumed it was a chunk of rubble that stabbed through the bed and into his skin, but he couldn't tell. He couldn't move. But the pain was intense.

It reminded him of the time his handlebars came loose on his bike, sending him face down into the ground. With the inflation of age, he guessed they were still nowhere near the same level of pain. But it was the best he could do. And at that moment he would think of anything to take his mind off of his helplessness.

Then everything went silent.

Noah's breathing became wheezing. The dust settled and the building stopped shaking. The air became thick without the presence of noise and it unsettled Noah. He tried to scream again, but the rubble shifted on top of him. The stabbing sensation stopped, but it fell flat on him, crushing his body under ten times his own weight.

He wanted to die. Later on, when he would lay with Liara under three full moons, he would describe the feeling as death. Like the reaper himself was unhinging its jaw and slowly taking him in whole. It unsettled him, made him want home. Not just Earth, but the desk, with the cool surface and the hum of the air conditioner.

Then there were footsteps.

It took Noah a moment to escape from his own mind, but when he did he heard clunking. It was the sound a transformer made when it stepped down on concrete, except on a much smaller scale. And there were at least three pairs of them.

He heard them walk, clicking and clacking as they went through each room. They flipped things, shot things and dragged bodies out. Noah watched as they walked passed his room to the end of the hall and systematically dragged all the corpses back passed his room and put them God-knows-where.

There were at least thirty corpses that went by before there was a live one. It was a woman and she kicked and screamed the entire way. She yelled about her family and begged for anything but death, but the things dragging here weren't human; they didn't care.

What was worse than that though, was when she turned and saw Noah looking at her as she was dragged by. She yelled for him to help, as if the rubble covering him was just a ruse. She yelled to save here and Noah couldn't even yell back; he didn't want to yell back.

In fact he was filled with dread and fury. Though they would have gotten to his room in a matter of minutes at the pace they were going, in the back of his mind he was hoping they'd gather all the corpses they needed and pass him up. But she alerted them of his presence nonetheless, and they stormed in.

The two of them stood so close that he could only look up at their shins. They seemed to be communicating to themselves, but it was all just beeps and clicks to Noah. He didn't know what they were doing, but they weren't trying to get him up, they weren't even touching him.

The Geth waited for their third comrade to return. They turned and looked at him. His armor was red, he must have been the leader. His inner mechanisms made a few hisses and clicks and they all turned back towards Noah.

He looked up as the red armored Geth stepped forward and un-holstered his side arm. The barrel was inches from his nose. Noah could feel the heat from it. He had just returned from shooting the woman and any number of barely living souls. Noah was filled with a cinderblock of regret. In that moment he wanted the Geth to pull the trigger.

And it did…and things went silent.

There was a cold feeling on his arms, a soft humming…like an air conditioner turned on high. There was heat on his face, and intense heat. His eyes squeezed tight, for a moment he believed he was back in the computer lab. He believed the nightmare was over. But he couldn't feel the rest of his body.

His arms felt cold, his face felt warm, but the rest was still under the rubble, slowly dying. When Noah opened his eyes he saw a bright red light. It encompassed a small, focused red ball of plasma. The ball sat there, barely poking out of the gun, singing the tip of his nose.

The Geth was frozen. It's comrades looked at each other and then down at Noah. They both drew out their guns and pull the trigger. Two loud, hissing blasts erupted from the barrels of their guns, but they never reached Noah.

They exploded against a semi-transparent blue wall as it materialized in front of Noah. The Geth continued to fire, bombarding the shield with welding-hot plasma, with little affect. Then, when they stopped to reload, the shield dropped. Noah closed his eyes and cursed at the God that allowed him to garner false hope.

Then it exploded.

From inside of Noah, a dome of the same blue matter expanded at an exponential speed, pushing back all three Geth and crushing them against the hospital wall. The rubble was caught in the dome's path as well, clearing Noah's back from the weight that had been pushing down on him.

An rushing wave of relief covered Noah's body as the debris was cleared. He tried to let out a yelp of pure ecstasy, but only the wheezing cough came, with the trickle of blood. Even without the roof on his back he was still dying and he still couldn't move.

But he did just kill three Geth, or at least he thought he did. There was little chance that there was anyone left alive in the building, let alone someone who could save him. Then again, he wasn't in any condition to be saving anyone, let alone creating a 'magical' force field of repelling goodness.

There was no other seeable explanation. So Noah closed his eyes and tried again. He felt the cold on his arms and he felt his finger twitch. There was no barrier but his finger moved. So he tried harder, clenching his teeth and threatening to push his brain right out of his skull.

It twitched again and so did others. He clenched his fist and unclenched it. Every movement felt like it was taking something from his mind, like he was spending mental energy on tasks normally done by physical energy. So he pushed harder, feeling the blood well up in his brain, headache coming on, and tried to push himself up off the ground.

With both hands unclenched, palms on the tiles, he pushed. He got as far as a half-push-up before falling back down. But he forced himself to try again, pushing with everything his mind could muster against the ground and trying to bend his knees so as to get them under him for support and flexing his ankles to put his bare feet on the tiles and hacking and wheezing his lungs raw and…

He stood.

The cuts along his feet stung and made footing difficult, but he stood. Arcs of blue light circled around his fingers and down to his wrist, up his forearms and across his chest to reach the rest of his body. They pulsed and traveled the entirety of his body in milliseconds.

A 'magical' circular-vascular system made up of mental energy and pure will power. The thought didn't cross him mind at the time, but looking back he was proud and a little afraid of himself. That kind of power was…it was something. And it let him walk.

Albeit he walked liked Forest Gump without leg braces, but he walked. He walked himself out of the hospital and out into the terror filled landscape of Geth-filled Eden Prime. A "Serene Paradise"…that was about spot on.