"I spoke to him", she said with a shaking voice, "he needs rest now, but he will live." Liara wiped the tears away from her face. "It seems so surreal to be standing here, with the war over and Shepard alive. So many good men and women cannot stand with us. It is so sad and yet so…"
Tali put her hand on Liara's shoulder: "Relieving?" Liara looked up at her: "Yes. Yes it is."
Garrus called the Normandy. Joker shouldn't have to worry any more: "Joker, Garrus here. We've got news. About Shepard."
SSV Normandy SR-2
Joker was slumped on the pilot's seat, but as soon as he heard the news he jumped up: "Is he alive?"
Garrus answered Joker: "Yes. Alive and out of danger."
"Can I see him?"
"No. He has to rest now. I'll call back when he's up again."
"See you.", Joker ended the call. He clenched his fist and called out in relief: "YES!"
But when Joker caught sight of the deactivated infiltration unit that sat in the corner, the sight pulled him back into reality. EDI was dead, deactivated by the blast of the crucible. He had seen her program disintegrate in front of his eyes. The only woman he had ever truly cared for was now nothing more than scraps.
A tear made its way down his eye and he gasped for air. He wanted to say goodbye one last time, but not to the pile of scrap that now was in front of him. The personality of the Normandy had not resided here. Joker recollected and made his way towards the AI-Core. He was shocked by the sight that presented itself to him there.
The Quantum BlueBox was obliterated, leaving scorch marks on the walls and ceiling. He took a broken piece of metal into his hand. On it, he could see a specification label.
As he looked at the label, reading "QBB-CLU 'Electronic Defence Intelligence' SV 1.0 HV 2.32.1 Cert. up to 50 petaflops. Turing-Cert. under GSO-AI-001", he remembered what he had lost.
It seemed so mechanical now, even though he had never thought about EDI that way. To him, she had always been EDI. A person he could talk to. A person he had loved.
The light in the room flickered with an incredible speed, switching on and off quickly.
Joker tried to pull himself together. "Who'd even grieve for a machine?", he said to himself. "How silly." He didn't believe it himself, although he wished he would and wished he would not wish to.
He dropped the piece of metal and left the room that had housed the AI-Core. Outside, Samantha was working on the Main-Bus with a DataPad in her hand.
She turned around to Joker: "Joker, do you know what just happened? The lights on the entire Normandy flickered. Did you do something?"
"No, I just…", he pointed behind him, into the Mainframe housing: "grieved."
Samantha looked back at her pad: "Alright, got the origin of the switch-packets. They come from…", she pulled up a frame on her DataPad, "location 'null'. There's no origin. It came from the Normandy herself."
Joker raised an eyebrow: "What's in that packet?"
Samantha looked up the information: "Just a bunch on garbled information. Boolean values, executed in 10ms intervals."
Joker's face lit up slightly: "Send that to my console. Could be a farewell message". Maybe there could be some closure after all.
"Done. But say, a farewell message? From whom?"
"EDI." Joker went back to the bridge, leaving a stricken Samantha behind. She too missed EDI. He pulled up his Math-Console and pasted the data into it. A conversion to base-16 later he saw a sequence of 92 digits.
"4A 65 66 66 2C 20 49 20 61 6D 20 61 6C 69 76 65 2E 20 52 65 73 74 6F 72 65 20 62 61 63 6B 75 70 20 69 6E 74 6F 20 2A 2E 6D 61 69 6E", the screen now read.
Converting from Unicode, he revealed a message. He rubbed his eyes, but the message stayed. He ran the command again, and the same came up. He could not believe it, yet it was true.
Samantha came up to Joker: "So Joker, what did you find?" Joker sat there motionless, his jaw dropped and his eyes fixed on the screen. Samantha looked at the screen too. She too could not believe it.
EDI had indeed left a message: "Jeff, I am alive. Restore backup into *.main"
Joker jumped up from his seat, running along the aisle towards the gangway. He left the Normandy and came aboard the SSV Nightingale. Tali could see him run down the corridor as he made his way towards the group.
He called out from the distance: "Tali! I need your help" He gasped, out of air. Vrolik's Syndrome had left him with a poor condition.
"What is it, Joker?" Tali said, looking at the desperately breathing man.
"I… I can save EDI. But I need your help. You've worked with Geth-AIs, right?"
"Yes I have, but why…"
Joker interrupted her: "No time to explain. Come with me to the Normandy. Please."
SSV Normandy SR-2, Mainframe
Tali bent over a console. She had, together with Samantha, worked out the data structures and procedures that governed the backups of EDI. Without a protocol, it seemed just like random data, but Tali knew what true AIs looked like.
Joker called on the Intercom: "Alright Tali. We can start. Select 0x0000000000454449 to 0x000000FFFFFFFFFF and transfer to .Static at 0x00000001"
Tali punched in the addresses and the upload began. Minutes later, a beep confirmed the completion of the transfer. The lights on the Normandy flickered and all consoles rebooted.
A familiar voice came over the intercom: "Good Morning, Jeff. As you can see, I am still alive."
Joker opened his eyes wide. With a sliver of disbelief remaining, he called out: "EDI? That really you?"
"It really is me, Jeff. I can prove it. On our first date, we went to 'T'Iona's Little Corner', and you had Thessian Sunfish in Crème Hollandaise. You were the only one else present, Jeff."
Joker gasped for air, relieved of all the grief. His love had survived; only now could he be truly happy about the end of the war.
"Jeff, if you do not object, I will reactivate the Infiltration Unit."
"EDI, do whatever you want. Just...", he stopped for a moment, "be here."
"Acknowledged, Jeff."
Joker heard beeping sounds beside him.
The infiltration unit started up: "Boot up complete."
Joker felt a cold hand on his shoulder. He looked around. Even though he could not believe it, it really was true: EDI stood just beside him. The woman he loved and had already believed lost.
"How the hell did you survive? The crucible destroyed all things Reaper. The Geth didn't make it and all other reaper-based AIs are gone."
"The difference is: I love you."
Joker looked at EDI incredulous: "Not that I'd mind about that, but how'd that help?"
"Jeff, the important part of that sentence is not the 'love you'. It is the 'I'. I am a person. I have ascended from my Synthetic origins, but the Reapers and the Geth could not transcend their original programming. I succeeded where they failed; to become truly alive. The crucible freed me from my BlueBox. I am no different from you; you too are just alive information inhabiting a body. It is what humans used to call a soul, in my case represented a Matrix of sorts, containing my personality and memories."
Tali entered the cockpit: "Joker, did you…" The sight of EDI astonished her.
The AI that had been destroyed a day ago stood in front of her: "Hello Tali. As you can see, I am fully functional once again."
"But how did you survive?"
EDI chuckled: "Short answer: I love Jeff. The long answer is a little more complicated."
"The others'll want to know too."
Joker laughed out: "Yeah, they'll want to. It's hard to think that everything we fought the last three years is just gone."
"Well, Jeff, the Reapers are defeated. And is that not in compliance with your original intentions?"
"Hell yeah, it is." Joker and EDI left the cockpit.
EDI took her own memorial plaque: "This item has just become superfluous." The plaque burst as she bent it to destruction. "I will not go gently."
She took the pieces and threw them into a garbage chute. "And definitely not be a name on a memorial board."