"He'll fine Tali, he just suffered a concussion, he should have a bit of bruising around his face, but otherwise he'll be fine."
"I was a little worried there."
"Don't be, he'll be fine at this point, although I can understand why you're worried, he did get mauled by a very powerful biotic after all."
"Thanks for the reassurance Doctor, I guess trying to stop that fight was a bad move, wasn't it?"
"Sometimes when we want to save the world it doesn't want to be saved." Chakwas said sadly.
"Is that a human saying?"
"Yes, I don't get to use that one often, I learned it from one of my colleagues while I was in medical school, a bit poetic, isn't it?"
"Not what I'm used to."
Something beeped on Dr. Chakwas's computer. "Oh, what's this?"
"Something the matter?"
"He seems to be having an intense dream right now, similar to what happened to Shepard on Horizon, back before he recruited you."
"You mean when Saren was still alive?"
"Yes, Shepard had to pull Kaiden out of the pull of a prothean beacon that we were supposed to take home with us, but Shepard couldn't get out of it's sphere of influence before he was sucked in, it gave him some sort of vision, about organics being slaughtered by synthetics."
"That sounds like quite the tale."
"It is, I don't think we have the time to discuss it now, I think I'll be going now, I have to get to sleep. She had bags under her eyes, is that what humans look like when they're tired?
But then Tom stirred.
"Oh, it looks like he's waking up."
"Is that a bit quicker then he should've woken up?"
"Actually yes, he should still be dreaming right now, that's a little odd, but I've done some similar things when I sleep, I sometimes wake up in the middle of a dream so it might be a little more normal then I know."
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
"Oh, hey." I woke from my 'talk' if you could call it that.
"Welcome back to the waking world Tom, are you alright?" Chakwas said.
"Yes, I do have a bit of a pounding headache though."
"Don't worry about that, it's probably just from the mauling you had, but you'll be fine."
"Good to know." She didn't know the real reason why.
"I'll be leaving now, it's time I got some rest." Dr. Chakwas left the room.
"You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?" Tali asked. I quickly disabled EDI from listening in to our conversation.
"I did, Shepard was supposed to get to them earlier, I had to stall them, although it did come at a small cost."
"It did, is there anything else that's supposed to happen before the suicide mission?"
"Well, I regret saying this, but you're going to get into a fight with Legion." She didn't seem surprised at this.
"I can understand that, but why do I?"
"It's because you'll catch him scanning your Omni-tool on classified data that you had on there." She was taken aback by this.
"How dare he?! It was annoying enough as is to deal with him, now this?!
"I have a way to fix this just request him to se-" The door to the AI core opened up, showing Legion standing there. Well shit, my only saving grace is that I only refered to him once, and he might've missed that, and the fact that we were standing on the opposite side of the room, so there was a good chance that he didn't hear anything that would really mess with the story line, I've already screwed it up as is.
"Oh, um, hey, Legion, is everything good?" I said awkwardly, I was more then glad he couldn't pick up on social cues now.
"Conditions are adequate at the current moment."
"Sorry we were just discussing some matters, on uh, stuff.."
"Acknowledged." He walked past us, probably going for the elevator.
"That was too close." Tali said.
"It was, we can't risk this ever happening again, I have to terminate the block on this room now, because EDI will start getting suspicious if I do."
"Ok, can you tell me what to do in that situation, just being vague?"
"Yes, hold that thought for a moment." I disabled my block on this part of the ship, and then turned off my Omni-tool.
"Basically offer him so unclassified data if he eventually does scan you're Omni-tool to convince him to not transmit the important stuff, also make it so it isn't completely useless, I can't have you fighting over that."
She seemed a little reluctant, but nodded. "Thanks for telling me about this Tom, we'll talk later."
"Of course."
I left the med bay with a lot more than I originally wanted on my mind. At least Tali knew now, so the fight might be less severe or not exist at all now. Now I just have to finish the reaper IFF and we should be as good as gold. All I had to do at that point with the IFF was to integrate it properly into our systems. I hope I broke all the encryptions and failsafes on it, I seriously can't risk the collectors getting at us.
I made way for the bridge and then sat down on my terminal, Joker was sleeping so the ship was on auto pilot. . This was going to be a long day, since I didn't even know how to integrate this thing into our systems.
...
"Hey Tom, how are you doing?" Joker asked as he walked onto the bridge and sat down in his favorite seat.
"I'm doing well, we're about an hour out from the Geth station that Shepard was talking about, I made sure thermal emissions were cloaked."
"Thanks, I better get back to work now, at least I enjoy this job."
"Hell, you can make this ship dance with little effort, I would question your sanity if you didn't like this job."
"Yeah, yeah, have you finished integrating our IFF?''
"It was a little harder than I'd like, EDI helped me out a little bit, I hope I did it right."
"Tom, you integrated it into our ship at it's best, I don't see the reason for increased stress in multiple parts of your brain."
"It's an organic thing EDI, don't worry about it." Joker said.
I left the bridge soon after that, I had nothing to do and decided to grab something to eat since it had taken me a while to get that dang IFF integrated into our systems, I think I did it right, but I still think I left a vulnerability. I brushed those thoughts aside and grabbed a small coffee from the vending machine they had that instead of selecting options to dispense and drinks it simply had a keypad in which you could type what ever liquid you wanted.
I sat down, checking my Omni-tool for anything I needed to do at the moment, I was very organized and like to keep things in a very clean fashion, shame that I usually never kept the same room/board for long in my old world.
"Hey Tom." I looked up.
"Oh, hi Miranda, what's up?"
"Jacob and myself were planning to play to pass the time, do you want to join us?" I was taken aback by that. They had board games in the future?! And it was still mainstream? Wow, this was also kind of ironic since Miranda is usually all business, she almost never shows her emotions at all or does anything that isn't related to her job. Then I realized I was staring at her, lost in thought, it must've been weird.
"Oh, uh yeah! Sure! Where are we meeting?"
"In the lounge, it's me, you, Kasumi, and Jacob that are playing." Alright, that also answers my question of who else was playing.
"I'll be there in a second."
...
"Alright, I'm the top hat, that one is mine." I claimed.
"I just want the car please." Jacob said.
"The cat is mine." Kasumi said
"I'll take the dog." Miranda said impassively.
The game was pretty boring, it was monopoly, but with the occasional lucky moment where someone either landed on a bad or good tile to keep everyone from getting disinterested. It still surprises me to this day how good Jacob is at the game. He got lucky and got the two most expensive properties early on and absolutely screwed Kasumi over when she landed his hotel on Boardwalk, although that might've been a good thing since a little bit after that Shepard called her to do Legion's loyalty mission.
Miranda died from my own hotel on one of the more expensive properties, and she never bankrupted anyone else because she got all the cheap properties. She spouted some crap when she lost about her strategy being 'economically sound' she was a pretty sore loser. It was a close battle between me and Jacob, and I kept getting lucky and missing all of his hotels, but I died in the worst way possible.
"That is total stupid! I should've never gotten that stupid community chest card!" Jacob laughed.
"I have to admit that was probably the worst way to die, I didn't even know that was in a community chest."
What happened is that I had gotten a community chest that said "Advance straight to boardwalk." I could understand how much of an advantage it would be at the start of the game, but it was a death card at the end of the game.
"Oh well, I shall accept my defeat, unlike Miranda."
"The only reason I lost was because this game is unrealistic, I would've won in real life."
"Pity this isn't real life."
"I'm going now, I've had enough of this game."
I decided to browse the extranet since I had a bit of spare time.
The state of the extranet kind of reflects what the state of the citadel was in at the moment. It was lazy, there had been no new innovations for several centuries, due to the Reapers making everyone rely on Element zero for FTL and since it was used in biotics we couldn't really replace it with anything else. People still died at a natural age, no one had invented anything that could extend the lifespan of a living being because no one cared, especially the Asari.
The only real good advancements were in inventions of the Omni-tool, there were tons of mods that could advance it, and there was a lot of biotic amps you could buy too that were constantly being improved, that was the only thing that people really advanced recently. Maybe if I live to see the end of the Reaper war I could try and get people to rely on more than just element zero, but that's assuming I make it through the war and manage to get some influence, which I doubt.
It was possible I wouldn't even survive the suicide mission.