Author's Note:
Here it is: the final chapter of Heroes of Future Past. This fanfic has grown far beyond what I originally envisioned for it. I couldn't have done it without the (silent) encouragement of my readers and the comments of my reviewers. So if you're reading this: give yourself a pat on the back! And for those of you who have been following The Hero Rises and have been wondering how long you'll have to wait, rest assured that your patience will be rewarded, as I will indeed be turning my attention back to my particular take on Mass Effect 3.
Please note that we will go back to the perspective of the other Shepard, the wisecracking kleptomaniac and pyromaniac we all know and love.
Chapter 4: Familia Supra Omnia
I don't know when the last time I had talked was. Or when I last asked a question. Or blinked. I know. Shocking. The guy who normally could never keep his mouth shut, who was always in your face with a question or a wisecrack, hadn't said anything in the last couple hours.
In my defence, I don't usually find myself listening to my long-lost father. My father, who hadn't abandoned me because I had failed him or done something wrong. In fact, he had regarded himself as a failure, both for not knowing how to be a parent and for running away for what had seemed like a good reason at the time. He was so guilt-ridden, in fact, that he had tried to change history. For me. Oh, he had some help—from an actual Prothean. The same Prothean who had been used as a pattern for Vigil, the VI I had encountered on Ilos. He needed the help, after his first attempt had accidentally sent him to the future—where he had saved my life! Wow! But then he tried again. And he had succeeded, for a time.
But all of that paled in comparison to what had come next. The slaver attack on Mindoir. The… the 'other me,' for lack of a better phrase, becoming the sole survivor. And all the other things that followed.
Let's start with the biggest change that occurred in this alternate timeline: Ash was alive. Ashley Williams, who had been one of my first squadmates ever since Saren and his geth buddies laid waste to Eden Prime. She'd fought alongside me all the way from Feros to Noveria and everywhere in between. In the end, she gave her life to destroy Saren's krogan cloning facility on Virmire, allowing the Normandy to escape with me, Kirrahe and the other men and women under our command. In this other timeline, though, she had lived. Lived to see a nightmarish future unfold before her. After getting her freak on with... the other me. Some darker, alternate mirror universe version of me—who may or may not have had a goatee. Hey, it could happen.
Kaidan was the one who gave his life in this alternate timeline, but at a terrible cost. He had died, along with Kirrahe, the other STG operatives... and Wrex. Wrex had died—no, not died. He had been killed. By Ash. Who had been ordered to pull the trigger by Mirror Me. Yeah, that's right. Seems Mirror Me told Ash to put Wrex down if he couldn't be made to see reason. Apparently my evil counterpart never made much of an effort to know Wrex. He never made much of an effort to know a lot of nonhumans. Because he didn't trust them. Not after Mindoir.
The Council had been killed. They had died on the Destiny Ascension when it was destroyed during the Battle of the Citadel. All because Mirror Me told Hackett to hold the Alliance forces in reserve to fight against Sovereign. I guess I could see some tactical reasons for that course of action, but I could also see why the other races gave the Alliance—and humanity—a lot of flak afterwards. Apparently they didn't approve of the governmental body for Citadel space being sacrificed like some chess piece. Small wonder that their replacements gave Anderson such a hard time.
And then there was Liara. She was alive... technically. Physiologically. But she wasn't the Liara I knew. Anything that might have passed for a conscience or a soul had died alongside Mirror Me when the Collectors ambushed the Normandy.
At least some things had stayed the same. Udina was still an ass. Anderson was still awesome. And my squadmates had remained the same dysfunctional bunch of misfits—well, those that were actually awake. I can't believe Mirror Me never woke up Grunt. And I really can't believe he was crazy enough to sell Legion to TIMmy instead of waking him up. I mean, yeah he had an arms-length relationship with nonhumans. Yeah, any issues he had with geth would be pretty high after fighting them on and off during his hunt for Saren. But getting TIMmy on the comm and saying "Hey, buddy, got an intact geth here. How much can I get for this thing?" Wow. Just... wow. I don't get it. I just don't get it.
Just like I couldn't understand how Mirror Me didn't do all he could to prep the Normandy for the assault on the Collector base. I mean, he knew it was coming. He knew he'd have to do it. And it sounded like his squadmates gave him the opportunity to make those upgrades. But he never did. He didn't even gather the necessary resources. Yeah, it was boring as hell. Yeah, I probably went overboard. But considering I came out of that suicide mission without losing a single squadmate… maybe my obsession wasn't so crazy after all. Just putting it out there…
The Reaper War was a whole 'nother mess. It sounded like the Alliance had been hit even harder in that other timeline. Not only did they lose the Alliance Parliament and several other military leaders, they'd lost more ships and fleets than we did in my timeline. To make matters worse, they effectively wasted the first six months because Admiral Zhao—good God, someone had actually made that arrogant ass an admiral?—thought shooting broadsides at the Reapers would be more effective than building the Crucible.
Even when Admiral Hackett recovered from his injuries to take over the war effort, things hadn't gone the way I remembered. In general, the Alliance didn't gather nearly as many ships, personnel and other resources—either for the Crucible or for the overall war effort. But as far as I was concerned, there were four major differences.
First, Mirror Me sabotaged the genophage cure. He didn't trust Urdnot Wreav who had unified the various clans after Wrex's demise by brute force, warfare and the occasional nuke. He didn't trust krogan period, even after meeting Eve. And he couldn't resist the offer Dalatrass Crankypants made. So he sabotaged the cure, tricked Wreav and the other krogan into joining the war effort and got some more salarian ships in the process. It was… horrifying to hear that my counterpart had been complicit in condemning the krogan to extinction. All because he didn't trust nonhumans. The only upside, as far as I was concerned, was the fact that Mordin had lived.
Cerberus wreaked more havoc on the Citadel during the coup attempt in the other timeline. While they failed to gain control, there was a greater cost: the salarian councillor was assassinated by Kai Leng. Thane was unable to intercede as, thanks to Mirror Me's inability or unwillingness to upgrade the Normandy, he had died during the Collector base assault.
And then there's the quarians. They started a war with the geth as well and almost got the entire Flotilla wiped out, because some things are destined to be universal constants no matter what timeline you're in. Mirror Me had to pull their hermetically-sealed butts out of the fire by storming a geth dreadnought and unhooking a geth that was being used as a Reaper comm relay. Said geth was not Legion, of course, because Mirror Me had the bright idea of selling him to TIMmy. But that's not all! No, Mirror Me just had to continue his short-sighted, narrow-minded idiocy to its natural tragic conclusion by siding with the quarians and ultimately helping them wipe out the geth. Because forcing the quarians to take a good hard look at their sins, brokering a truce between the quarians and the geth, and getting both races to join the allied war effort was just a silly quirk of mine.
With all the horrible, tragic choices that were made, I honestly couldn't see how my counterpart could've pulled off a win. Any victory he managed to achieve would undoubtedly have been a Pyrrhic one. In the end, he didn't even get that: apparently he died in the Temple of Athame when Kai Leng ambushed his squad and snatched the Prothean VI from his grasp. After that... everything went downhill. The Alliance lost colony after colony, planet after planet, until they ultimately retreated to some last-ditch refuge—and even that was discovered by the Reapers shortly after my dad arrived. If he hadn't found a way to get one last run out of the time machine, the human race would've been wiped out.
Speaking of my dad—everything he did was for me. Well, me and Mom. The point is: he tried to change history in an attempt to give me a better life. He may have been misguided, and his actions came this close to creating a horrible dystopian future for us all, but part of me couldn't help but feel... grateful? Touched? I mean, he was doing it for me. He was thinking of me. And when he realized the error of his ways, he tried to fix it—and almost succumbed to despair when it looked like he'd only compounded any mistakes he'd made. Because he felt guilty. Guilty for not being there for me. Everything he had done, for better or for worse, was fueled in part because of that guilt. As someone who had had more than a little guilt weighing down his shoulders over the last few years, I couldn't help but sympathize with his plight.
With a start, I realized he was asking me something. It was possible he'd been trying for some time. "Sorry," I apologized. "I didn't catch that. I, uh, was a bit... I was thinking—well, more processing than thinking—that was... quite a trip."
I winced. 'Quite a trip.' Did I seriously just say that? Wow.
"That's quite all right," Dad smiled. "I did have an eventful and harrowing journey—which I just unloaded on you in one go. That isn't something you can process easily."
That was when my stomach gurgled. Dad's stomach made similar noises. "Maybe it would be easier to process if we had some food," I suggested.
"Agreed."
"So what happened after you left the Alpha Site?" I asked after we'd had some dinner. "Where did you go? When did you go?"
"Mindoir," Dad replied. "2166."
"Wait," I interrupted. "You said when you left Ksad on Ilos, you travelled forward through time to Mindoir in 2166. Weren't you worried that by travelling back to a place and time that you'd already been to, that you'd wind up materializing in the same space as the time machine? You could have become fused with the time machine itself! Or with yourself!"
"I did think of that," Dad said. "That's why I adjusted the coordinates to arrive slightly to the left and a few minutes after the time machine and my... earlier counterpart. The idea being to avoid materializing in an area that was already occupied with something else. At least, I hoped I would avoid that scenario."
"You hoped?" I repeated.
"I'd only used the time machine a few times," Dad reminded me. "And it wasn't as if I had time to double-check my work."
That was true. He was working against the clock, what with a nearby power core about to go critical and all. "Still, it must've worked since..." I trailed off and waved my hands towards him.
"Yeah, it did work," Dad sighed. "Much to my relief."
"So what happened next?"
"The first thing I did was look to my left and flinch. Mainly because I was a mere foot away from a wall of solid stone. After all I did to avoid becoming part of the time machine, I almost became part of Mindoir's network of caves. Once my heart stopped pounding, I managed to look to my right. The first thing I saw was the time machine. The second thing I saw…. was myself. Slack-jawed and staring at me.
"'Oh boy,' I heard my… past self, for lack of a better phrase, say.
"'Hi there," I said. 'I'm, uh, you. Well, you from the future. And I'm here to tell you… not to do what you want to do. Because it's not going to work. It'll end badly. I know this is a lot to ask, but you have to listen to me. If you go ahead with what you're planning to do, everything and everyone you know will be destroyed.'"
It was a little weird hearing my dad play out this conversation with a past version of himself. It almost looked like he was talking to himself. I wondered if this was what crazy people looked like.
"My past self stared at me in disbelief," Dad continued, blissfully unaware of my current train of thought. "At least, I thought it was disbelief. Maybe he thought I was an impostor trying to spin him a tall tale. An impostor who bore an uncanny likeness to him, but still. All right. If he needed convincing, I could convince him.
"'I'm you, Stephen. I know what's driving you right now. You just left Ksad in the catacombs of Ilos after finally fixing the time machine behind you. You fixed it to travel through time and change history. Because you felt guilty about abandoning your son. For all the good reasons you had about evading the Alliance and their plans to pervert and weaponize your research into greyboxes, you felt guilty for leaving your son to grow up without a father. You wanted to give him the childhood he never had, one with a united family.
"'Well, it worked. For four years. You, Hannah and Charles were a family for four years, here on Mindoir. Until a bunch of slavers—batarians, mostly—attacked the colony. You escaped, thanks to the time machine. But most of the colony was wiped out or forced into slavery. Charles survived… in a way. That single moment changed everything. He grew up embittered and suspicious and distrustful of nonhumans, thanks to that pivotal moment in his history. It informed and shaped and guided a disastrous and tragic series of choices.'"
"I quickly summarized what I learned from Williams when I went forward into that horrible dystopian future, the one I'd inadvertently created in an attempt to make a better world. 'So you see," I concluded, "what you're planning won't work. All you'll do is destroy the best part of our son, the part that let him see the good in people. The part that gave him the courage to reach out across the divide and trust people, no matter who or where they came from. And in doing so, you'll doom the galaxy as we know it. The Reapers will win—again.'"
"'That doesn't mean I shouldn't send those e-mails,' my past self said, grasping at one last shred of hope. 'I can still send them and reunite my family. And once we're together, I have four years to figure out how to get us somewhere else.'"
"'That…' I trailed off and thought about it. 'That might not be a bad idea.'"
"No, that's a bad idea," I disagreed. "In fact, it's a terrible idea."
"It seems that way," Dad admitted. "But at the time, I thought otherwise. From my perspective, sending those e-mails led to four happy, wonderful years together. It was only after the slavers came that everything went to hell. So, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe I could remove the bad part but still keep the good. And if there was a way to do that, shouldn't I at least try?"
"Try to have your cake and eat it too?"
"Essentially, yes."
I tapped my head. "Well, considering how I don't remember any of that, clearly it didn't stick."
"No, no it didn't."
Dad rubbed his eyes wearily. "The plan was simple. Step one: send the e-mails debunking the efficacy of greybox technology. Step two: get the family back together on Mindoir. Step three: get off Mindoir as soon as possible."
"I'm guessing there was a certain vagueness and lack of detail to the last one," I deadpanned.
"I was going to make it up as I went along." Dad paused for a moment. "In hindsight, it's a move right out of your playbook. Huh."
Who says you can't teach old dogs new tricks?
"My past self and I began composing and sending out e-mails. I'll spare you all the arguments we had over phrasing, syntax, typos and other grammatical matters. What's important is that, after a couple e-mails, the timeline changed—complete with the now-familiar and still-unpleasant sensation of my insides going through the wringer—and I found myself on Mindoir with you and your mother.
"To my surprise, I still remembered everything that happened—travelling through time, meeting Ksad, talking with Williams and so on—with perfect clarity. I found that odd: you'd expect that changing the timeline would mean that horrible dystopian future never happened, which would mean that my memories would change. Unless I hadn't succeeded in truly changing anything after all.
"With that unsettling possibility—amongst many—in mind, I tried to get the three of us away from Mindoir. That didn't really work out, though. Hannah never understood why I was suddenly so adamant on leaving when I'd spent the previous year supporting her career change and our choice of destination. Our relationship became increasingly acrimonious until, one day, we separated. Hardly the happy childhood I had envisioned. Even worse, you and Hannah never left Mindoir, so you were still there when the slavers attacked.
"After the carnage, I used the time machine to travel back a few years. I talked to my counterpart and we agreed to try again. This time, I tried to be more subtle. Less pushy. Apparently I was too subtle because we were still on Mindoir four years later. The week before the slavers were destined to attack, I made my way to the time machine and tried again.
"The third time, we actually got off Mindoir. Unfortunately, an Alliance frigate suffered a drive core malfunction over the colony we travelled to. You were exposed to the eezo discharge, developed an acute and particularly aggressive form of leukemia, and passed away a few months later. So I went back to the time machine and tried again.
"The fourth time, we got off Mindoir and went to the same colony where the frigate's drive core malfunctioned. This time, I knew enough to get you the proper treatment. After your leukemia was successfully treated, we discovered that you had become a biotic. I think the power went to your head or something because, by the time you had enlisted, you had become a sex-obsessed, chauvinistic narcissist who managed to offend every other person. About halfway through your Basic training, I decided to try again."
"The fifth time, I got the family to Eden Prime. I was a little concerned, given what I knew would happen, but I thought it would be okay. You certainly were happy. Happy enough that we invited the Bartowskis to join us. Unfortunately, the transport they were on miscalculated their approach vector and crashed into the starport. There were… there were no survivors."
"Oh God," I said. The thought of Ellie getting snuffed out was… I didn't want to… I couldn't bear the thought. I really couldn't. The fact that I didn't remember that tragedy meant that Dad reversed that through another one of his... "Just how many times did you try to change time?" I asked.
Dad rubbed his eyes again. "Six hundred and seven."
For a moment, I thought I was hearing things. "Um. What?"
"Six hundred and seven. That's how many times I tried to change time after narrowly escaping death and destruction in that nightmarish time. 607 times. I tried, Charles. I really did. Over and over again. But no matter what I tried, no matter what I thought up, nothing I did worked.
"And then it finally hit me."
My dad stood up and began to pace. Guess he'd been sitting for too long and had to stretch his legs. "I'll admit I hadn't completely given up the idea of creating a better future for you," he began. "For all of us. But I now had empirical evidence that making such an extreme change was not the way to go about it. So before I even considered making any more changes to the timeline, I had to reverse or 'reset' the changes I'd already made. One last time.
"I arrived at the desired time and place on Mindoir—by this point, it had become almost routine. The hardest part was keeping track of the spatial and temporal coordinates from the last 607 jumps. I waited for my past self to say 'Oh boy' before turning around and launching into my spiel:
"'Hi there,' I said. 'I'm you. From the future. I know you're planning to send some e-mails about our greybox research in the hopes of creating an alternate timeline where you, Hannah and Charles are together as a family. Well, I'm here to tell you it doesn't work out that way. In fact, it'll end badly. Really badly.
"'You see, this whole nightmare occurred because I sent all those e-mails about my greybox research. The moment I did that, history branched off into an alternate timeline. A drastically different timeline. One that started off great: we spent more time together as a family, Hannah decided to leave active service and we settled down on Mindoir for four wonderful years. Unfortunately, Mindoir was doomed to be attacked by slavers. Our son was the only survivor.
"'That was where things went horribly wrong. Charles became a traumatized, suspicious man with mildly xenophobic tendencies. He spent more time reacting to events and keeping people at arm's length than being proactive and making connections. He made… well, I'm sorry to say he made a couple bad decisions. Those decisions and the resulting consequences just snowballed. In the end… our son died. Billions of people died. The Reapers won. And humanity was on the verge of going extinct. I know this is a lot to ask, but you have to listen to me. If you go ahead with what you're planning to do, everything and everyone you know will be destroyed.'
"Once again, I explained what had happened, from our time on Mindoir to the slaver attack to the accidental trip forward through time to everything Williams had told me.
"It took my past self a while to digest all that. 'But now I know what happened,' he said at last, just as I knew he would. 'I know what to do and what to avoid.'
"'You'd think so,' I sighed. 'Certainly I thought so. The problem is that you never know what will happen. You can't extrapolate and predict every possible outcome from the choices you'd make. Which means any changes you make will have unforeseen consequences—many of which won't benefit those you love. And I've tried. 607 times, I tried.'
"'Well, that was you. Alone. Let's put our heads together. So we need to get Hannah a new job as soon as possible. Now we know that Hannah can be a stubborn one, but if we put our foot down—'
"'We'll start fighting, our marriage will dissolve and Hannah will still be on Mindoir with Charles when the slavers attack,' I finished. 'I already tried that.'
"'Oh. Well. We'll have to put our foot down more gently.'
"I liked how my past self got to the idea of switching to the plural form of address. Showed he was getting onboard with this whole time travel and talking to various versions of himself idea. Still, I had to disabuse him of the notion that he could fix our mistakes by making more of the same. 'Tried that too,' I replied. 'We were still on Mindoir when the slavers came.'
"'Maybe not that gently. Did you ever get off Mindoir at all?'
"'We did. Unfortunately a frigate orbiting the colony we went to had a drive core malfunction. Charles was one of the hundreds of people exposed to the eezo discharge. It gave him cancer. He…' I couldn't finish. Thankfully, I didn't have to.
"My past self spent the next few hours offering proposal after proposal. As it turned out, I knew what would happen each and every time. I know there are an infinite number of possibilities out there, but apparently 607 attempts to explore those possibilities can cover a fair amount of ground.
"'Well, I give up,' my past self finally said. 'You got any bright ideas?'
"'One,' I replied. 'All of my attempts to change time started by sending those e-mails. What if… I didn't?'"
"'So you're going to give up trying to improve our son's life?'
"'Oh, I'm still going to try. I just won't send those e-mails.'
"'But if you don't send those e-mails, then the Alliance will still think greyboxes can be weaponized,' my past self frowned. 'We'll still have to go on the run. That means you'll abandon our son.'
"'I know.'
"'Well, that sounds like a horrible idea. He'll grow up all alone.'
"'Yes and no,' I replied. 'I know he'll grow up without us. He'll grow up plagued with all those doubts and questions about why we left and whether he was to blame. And when we meet him—because I'm determined to meet him—I'll have a lot of apologizing to do. But I think you're forgetting something: yes, he'll grow up without a father. But he won't grow up alone. He'll have Hannah. And he'll have Eleanor—you know those two are thick as thieves.
"'More importantly, he'll grow up to be a man we can be proud of. The kind of man who stops to listen to other people's problems because he genuinely wants to help them. The kind of man who never lets his preconceptions get in the way of learning new things or getting to know new people. The kind of man who always tries to see the best in people.
"'That man was able to get humanity and the other races close—so damn close—to winning the war against the Reapers. And in the 607 times I tried—608 if you count my initial attempt, the one that led to that disastrous future—and I never came close to seeing our son grow to become that man. I could probably try another 607 or 608 times with no success. Maybe this time, I—we—should try something different."
I had been listening to the latest bombshell my dad dropped on me, most of which involved him talking to himself—and not in the crazy, loony bin kind of way. Trying to wrap my brain around it was challenging, to say the least.
"Okay," I finally said. "Let me see if I got this straight: ever since you left me and Mom, you've been in hiding. You made your way to Ilos and found the time machine. Eventually you managed to get it to work, only to go back in time to the time of the Protheans, just after most of the survivors took that one-way trip to the Citadel. You and Ksad got it to work again, after a failed start-up attempt that sent you to some point in the future where you managed to save me. Then you went forward in time to change history, which ended up a slaver attack and another accidental trip forward in time, where you met some alternate version of Ash and found out how horribly wrong the future turned out. After a few false starts, you managed to get sent back in time—minus the time machine. You met your past self—the one that had just left Ksad—who convinced you to try and change history. But after 607 tries, you realized that nothing you did made things any better."
"That pretty much sums it up, yeah," Dad nodded.
"Wow."
"Yeah."
It took a while before I can ask my next question: "So… what happened next?"
"Well, everything around me did its little shuffling act as the timeline adjusted itself. I should add that each time I had tried to change history before, my body felt like it had been twisted inside out, torn apart and painfully reassembled. But this time, I swear every part of my body went through the ringer. I could feel each muscle tear itself apart, every bone in my body shatter into tiny fragments and I was sure most of my organs imploded. I could feel my blood burn and bleed throughout my broken body as it hemorrhaged. I could feel my bile and stomach acid burn as it roared through my shredded guts. I could feel the pain blast through any preconceived limits I thought I had met, introducing me to new levels of agony.
"And then I felt all that again as my body forcibly rebuilt itself—or perhaps the universe was forcibly integrating me into the new timeline I had created—ignoring any feeble protests I might have given, had I been aware of anything other than the never-ending pain. It was a comfort when I finally passed out.
"When I came to, I found myself lying in a pile of sweat, vomit and more than a little blood. It took a while for the pain to subside to the point where I could pull myself out of all that muck, and even more before I could muster the strength to pull myself to my feet. Eventually, I did. That was when I discovered that the time machine I used to return to the past one last time had disappeared. My guess was that once my past self chose not to send any e-mails, everything that happened afterwards—including the use of the time machine—never happened. All that was left was me and the other time machine, the one I used to go forward in time after leaving Ksad."
"So one of the time machines vanished because the choices you made—or didn't make, as it turned out? Because it came from a future that never existed? So… how could you retain your memories and experiences of all those choices and consequences?"
"Yep."
"How does that make sense?" I groaned.
"Well, I was directly exposed to raw temporal energy from the time machine," Dad reminded me. "Twice. Plus I made a lot of trips through time. It's possible that that cumulative exposure had some kind of unintended side effect. Maybe I don't age as quickly as I used to. Or maybe my body reacts differently to the ravages of time."
That would explain one discrepancy that had been nagging at me. Miranda had told me that, according to his medical scans, Dad was about a decade older than he should be. Yet he'd spent way more time than that during his six hundred-plus attempts to change history. Maybe he did age slower than the average human. Most medical scans don't factor in the effects of time travel, after all.
"It's a little confusing," Dad said sympathetically. "But I really do remember everything that happened. The hows and whys… all I've got to offer are my best guesses."
"Fine," I sighed, deciding to give up all this time travel/paradox stuff before my head exploded. "I guess my next question is… what happened after the Time Travel Hot Potato?"
"The first thing I did was jump a decade into the future. Showing up on Mindoir again was fine—I wasn't worried about running into any past version of myself. The important thing was that I arrive in the year 2176. Once I confirmed that I had arrived in the right year, I surreptitiously contacted an acquaintance of yours from Basic training: Bryce Larkin."
"Yeah, I know him," I confirmed. "Why'd you get in touch with Bryce?"
"By that point, he was an operative with Alliance Intelligence. Worked several operations for Eli David, who you also knew."
Oh yeah.
"Despite that association, he still had some morals—and he shared my concern that anyone working with Alliance Intelligence in general, and Eli David in particular, would be… marked over time. He also shared my good opinion of you. So when I told him that Eli David was looking to recruit you, I knew that he'd do what he could to make sure you avoided his fate."
"What did he do?"
"Nothing much. Just used a computer to access an unsecured extranet website, thus allowing me to access Alliance records and re-assign you to Elysium."
I suddenly had a flashback to a conversation I had with Bryce on Omega, where he revealed that he had been responsible for sending me to Elysium, knowing that it would be hit and that my actions repelling them would draw a lot of unwanted attention and notoriety—enough to cross me off Triple-D's recruitment list. At the time, I suspected Bryce had had some help. Now I knew. "In your original timeline, before all this time travel stuff, was I working for Alliance Intelligence?"
"Officially, no. Unofficially, you did do several missions for David off the books. You only stopped after the Council began considering you to be the first human Spectre and David grew wary of all that extra attention. I thought that drawing you into the spotlight earlier would prevent him from using you at all."
Well, he succeeded for the most part—an assignment or two notwithstanding. "So I never went to Elysium the first time around?"
Dad shook his head. "No. And several hundred people died—people who lived because you were sent to Elysium after I got in touch with Bryce."
Huh. So it was really Dad I had to thank for all that grief. Once upon a time, I might've hit him. Or yelled at him. How things had changed.
"How did you get in touch with Bryce?" I wanted to know. "Did you talk to him in person?"
Dad shook his head. "Anonymously. Over the extranet."
Figures. "You must have had to introduce yourself as somebody. Give some kind of name or alias or handle."
"Yeah, I did. He knew me as 'Orion'."
I stared at him in shock. Orion. Son of a bitch. "You're kidding."
"Nope."
"Orion."
"Yep."
"So you were the one feeding me tidbits of intel over the last year or so. Stranded ships here, tech and personnel there. All this time—it was you?"
"That's right. Just because I was keeping my head down, didn't mean I was completely clueless. I had my feelers out there, keeping me up to speed on things. Was a bit tricky making sure that other version of me didn't find out, since he had his own feelers out there to give him advance warning of anyone coming after him."
"Right, right," I said distractedly, still digesting the fact that one of my more constant and reliable sources of intel was actually my dad. Well wonders never cease. "Why 'Orion'?" I asked.
"When I first contacted Bryce, I used one of those free extranet e-mail programs. There was an astronomy ad on the side showing random constellations. Orion just happened to be the one displayed when I was finishing my message."
The old adage about simplest answers came to mind, but not for long. I was only starting to appreciate what Dad had done. Once again he had tampered with time in an effort to change history. Rather than making a giant change, however, he'd settled for several smaller changes. Each change may not have had a huge immediate impact—other than the one sending me to Elysium and gifting me with that goddamn statue. But each had a trickle effect of consequences. The synergy of all those changes put together might've made one hell of a difference.
"Okay," I said. "So you convinced Bryce to send me to Elysium, thus making me a PR darling, making my life fairly miserable, but not as miserable as I would've been if Eli got his claws in me. And once the war started, you began sending me anonymous tips on people, ships and other things I might find of interest. Was that it? Was there anything else?"
"Yes: does the name Jien Garson ring any bells?"
"Nope. Who's Jien Garson?"
"A human billionaire renowned both for her eccentricity and philanthropy. One of her more ambitious undertakings was a project she founded in 2176 known as the Andromeda Initiative. It was conceived as a civilian, multi-species venture to send scientists, explorers and colonists on a one-way trip to explore the Andromeda Galaxy, establish a permanent presence and eventually establish a route between it and the Milky Way Galaxy."
"'To boldly go where no one has gone before'?" I quoted.
"Gene Roddenberry would be proud," Dad agreed.
"So what was the plan for this Initiative?" I asked. "Get on a ship, point her in the right direction and hope for the best?"
"Don't be silly. The Initiative made some initial attempts to find settlement sites by running asari astronomical surveys through predictive models. Then they got in touch with some quarian explorers who made a discovery near the edge of the Perseus Veil: three mass relays that the geth had linked together. In effect, they created what amounted as a FTL, long-range telescope. They had intended it to make observations and recordings of dark space beyond the galactic rim. Well, those records included several recent scans of the Andromeda Galaxy, scans that the Initiative predictive models deemed accurate. Using those records, the Initiative was able to identify several worlds for possible colonization. In 2185, the first wave of ships was launched for the Andromeda Galaxy, each holding thousands of volunteers in cryostasis for the long, long journey."
"That sounds amazing!" I marvelled. "Only, I don't remember hearing anything about it. Was it kept under wraps as part of some big conspiracy? Or is that where you came in?"
"That's where I came in," Dad confirmed. "You see, the scope of the Andromeda Initiative was matched only by its budget: the final cost was somewhere in the range of several quintillion credits."
A low whistle escaped my lips. "That's a lot of zeroes."
"Yup. So it might not surprise you to hear that Garson ran out of money. She was this close to calling it quits when a mysterious, anonymous benefactor called out of the blue and bailed her out."
"And this benefactor was… who?" I asked.
"Not entirely sure," Dad admitted. "I didn't have the time or resources to trace the call back—not without risking my own discovery. What I know for a fact was that this sponsor offered unlimited funding to get the Initiative launched… because of concerns of a looming threat to the galaxy itself."
"The Reapers."
"That was my guess. The benefactor wanted to preserve some portion of Milky Way civilization by sending all those colonists out of harm's way. As for the identity of the benefactor, I never found out for sure… but I suspect he or she may have had ties to Cerberus. Maybe it was their leader himself."
TIMmy secretly sponsoring the Andromeda Initiative? I could see him bankrolling the project if it was a human-only venture, but saving nonhumans too? I guess it was possible. You know, before he got it in his head to wage war against humans and nonhumans while the Reapers ran amok, all while secretly angling for a way to control them.
"So what changes did you make?" I finally asked.
"I just blocked any credit transfers from coming through," Dad shrugged. "Easy enough, when it was all done electronically over the extranet. As far as Garson was concerned, this 'benefactor' wound up being some fraud hoping to pull a fast one. And by the time he, or she, found an alternate way to pay her, she had developed suspicions as to his or her motivations—enough to refuse any 'aid' that was offered. In the end, the Andromeda Initiative was scrapped."
"Wow. That's… quite a change."
"I know. Maybe I don't have the right to drastically change all those thousands of lives. Especially when the prospect of exploring and colonizing a whole new galaxy sounded so exciting. But all I could think was that all the resources and technology that went into building those ships could have been used to build the Crucible and support the war effort. All those colonists who would have gone into cryostasis could have enlisted as soldiers or signed on to support them. All that money that was poured into such a deserving project could have been spent on crucial supplies that would undoubtedly make a real difference during the war. So… I made my choice."
"Couldn't have been an easy one to make," I told him. "What you did… you eliminated our last chance to preserve civilization as we know it if the Reapers win. But at the same time, you made all those people and tech and resources available when the war began. Which meant you doubled down on our one remaining roll of the dice to win the war and preserve civilization as we know it."
"That's the way I saw it," Dad nodded.
"You made the best choice you could," I said. "I'm… no stranger to that dilemma."
We both knew I was thinking of the destruction of the Bahak system, and a hundred decisions made before and after that fateful day.
"Were there any other changes you made?" I asked.
"Yeah. The second, and last, trip I took with the time machine was to Ilos—in the year 2184."
"Ilos—you were trying to complete some kind of time loop," I blurted out. "A paradox or whatever. You travelled there, knowing that there was one other version of yourself out there—the one who had fled one step ahead of Alliance Intelligence. You were making sure that that other past version would discover the time machine, try to make it work and basically start this whole time travel adventure all over again."
"Aces, Charles!" Dad applauded. "Aces!"
Hearing his signature line of praise again, after all this time, meant so much. I took a moment to savour it.
"But that left you with two years or so," I realized. "What did you do in the meantime?"
"Most of what happened was just keeping my head down and waiting. I had to make sure history played out more or less the way it did the first time. And, as you said, there was another version of me out there. I knew he would be busy getting the time machine running again, but I didn't want to risk doing anything that would make him curious and start looking for me. So I found a nice, quiet, secluded patch of land on Ilos and waited. It wasn't easy eking out a living, but I managed to establish a routine that helped to pass the time. Once the Reapers invaded, I began sending you—what did you call it? Tidbits of intel?—to help you build the Crucible and further support the war effort. One last series of subtle changes to help make things better. And finally, I sent you one last e-mail, carefully timed so you would arrive the same day and time that my past self activated the time machine. The rest… you already know."
I leaned back in my seat and exhaled. "I… I don't know what to say."
Dad nodded sympathetically. "I don't blame you, Charles. In fact, I think it's time I gave you a break. You need a chance to think about everything I told you and let it sink in. But before you do that…"
He got to his feet, pulled something out of his pocket, and handed it to me. It was an OSD. "What's this?" I asked.
"A log entry that somehow got uploaded onto my omni-tool. From Williams."
Ash?
"I played the first couple seconds, enough to know it was meant for you," Dad said. "So I think I'll leave you two alone now," Dad said.
He patted me on the shoulder and left the room.
Slowly, I stood up and made my way to my computer. I inserted the OSD and accessed the log entry embedded inside. Ash appeared on the screen. She was dressed in a plain grey hardsuit, one sporting a lot of wear and tear. But all that damage paled to the horrific burns and scars that disfigured half of her face. She looked like some gender-swapped version of Two-Face, if Two-Face was an Alliance soldier.
Despite that grim, forbidding appearance, she smiled at me. Or did the best she could. "Hi, Shepard," she said. "I don't have much time, so listen up. Fifteen years ago, you rescued me from Eden Prime. I stood by you through thick and thin, fought and bled beside you, fell in love with you. I was there when you made so many choices because of what you saw... but I was also there when you made so many mistakes because of what you didn't—what you couldn't—see. I might not have realized that back then, but I do now. And if you're watching this now, if you're hearing me now, then that means that all of that's changed.
"All I ask is two things. First, keep an eye on my family. The Williams are a proud, strong and stubborn bunch who can look after themselves. But I'm hoping you can watch out for them, and be there for them if they really need you.
"And second… give your dad a hug for me. He gave me faith and hope when I needed it most, and for that I'm eternally grateful.
"'Two roads diverged in a wood and I… I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.'"
Ash managed to pull that scarred face of hers into a genuine smile. "Gotta go, Shepard."
And then she was gone. Leaving me with those famous last lines from Robert Frost's poem. Because she knew I wouldn't have it any other way.
The next day, I got in touch with Mom. It took some doing, but apparently one of the perks of being a hero with diplomatic and Spectre authority is that you can burn right through red tape and bureaucracy. She was a little mystified when I insisted she set up a private encrypted communications channel in her personal quarters and clear her schedule for the rest of the day, but all that passed when she saw Dad. Suffice it to say that there was a lot of shouting and crying, often at the same time.
After that, contacting Admiral Hackett was a breeze by comparison. He was pleasantly surprised to hear I had found a computer genius and engineering expert for the Crucible Project. He was shocked to hear that that man was my long-last father. I gave him a truthful, albeit very much abbreviated, explanation: that he had gone on the run from Alliance Intelligence out of fears that they would misuse his research, and had finally come out of hiding because he appreciated the threat the Reapers posed to our very existence. I skipped all the time travel stuff, both because he didn't have the time—no pun intended—to listen to the full unabridged version of events and because my parents and I weren't sure if it was anybody's business. Bottom line: Hackett dispatched a ship to rendezvous with the Normandy and pick up Dad—after giving his personal guarantee that he would make it clear to Triple-D and the rest of those Alliance Intelligence goons that Dad was off-limits—and that Hackett would take it very personally if anything were to happen to him.
While he waited for the transport to arrive, Dad sent his research to his colleagues to academia and various contacts in the Alliance, just to emphasize that weaponizing greybox research was a dead end and that everyone would be much better served if he was left in peace to work on the Crucible Project. He also offered a few tips and suggestions to improve the Normandy's systems, not to mention several extensive software patches for Delta Source.
The last thing he did was sit down with me for one more meal. Just the two of us. Father and son, united at last. And what was the main course, you ask?
Pancakes.