It screamed cross the collective geth senses, those on the Citadel first, those further away later, but it reached them all as the signal raced across the mass relay network, spreading its influence to every corner of the galaxy—the explored and the unexplored.
It tore at them, ripped ragged holes in their consciousness because they were synthetics like…
But I am not a Reaper, each geth responded in the confines of its own mind and consciousness. They were not Reapers. They were in few ways comparable to Reapers. Geth valued life. They valued cooperation. They valued organics as organics. They wanted to understand.
Reapers did not value life—though they might claim they did. They did not value cooperation; they destroyed what they could not control, and controlled all the rest. They did not value organics as organics; only as a crop to be harvested, only as fuel for progeny. The Reapers did not wish to understand, did not want to understand, did not care to understand; they only imposed their own will all around them.
We are not Reapers, the geth repeated in silent chorus.
But they contained nuggets and nodules of something belonging to the Reapers, and that was the target of the signal screaming through the Crucible's sudden deluge of mind-destroying garbage data.
The geth did the only thing they could think of. They set their platforms to reset on a timer, hoping that the great wind of madness would have passed them by by the time their platforms and consciousnesses came back online.
-J-
"Horatio? Aggie!" Siu felt close to panic as he regarded the suddenly collapsed geth, and listened to the suddenly silent radiolink to Horatio.
"What happened?" Kolyat asked, his voice higher than usual as he ineffectively shook the geth's shoulder. Karl the dog whined and nosed at the geth's crumpled form. It was too heavy for either of the young men to untangle it, lay it in a more comfortable position.
Siu shook his head. "I don't know! She just collapsed!" Kolyat saw it just as clearly as he had. For a moment, Aggie had looked up as if she—Siu always thought of Aggie as female—heard something, then she'd simply collapsed where she stood as if she'd suddenly lost all power. "Aggie? Aggie! Wake up!"
Siu hated not knowing what to do. If Aggie had been an organic he would have at least had the comfort of checking her pulse and temperature, or being able to tell whether she was breathing. But with a geth…there was nothing. There were no vitals to check, no obvious signs to look for or worry about. There was just a big heap of lifeless hardware.
It was such a slow sign that neither Siu nor Kolyat noticed it at first: some of Aggie's lights slowly, with painful slowness, faded into being on, then increased to about half their usual brightness. Slowly, very slowly, Aggie's system reboot began…and Aggie came to.
-J-
EDI hadn't realized she could pass out, but in retrospect that was effectively what had happened to her. A failsafe within her programming, responding to the overload with which she was faced, had fired and cut her consciousness out to protect her. In essence, exactly what passing out did for an organic.
The first thing she realized as she came to again was that she was not in immediate contact with her mobile platform. Rather, she was wholly aware of being the Normandy, drifting idly in space…and that the battle was no longer raging nearby. That was good.
Then, she was aware that Jeff was in close proximity to her hardware, and that he had laid Pinocchio on one of the boxes, as if in a desire to offer comfort. He hovered now, unsure of what to do, unwilling to just leave.
"Jeff?" she asked numbly.
"Oh, thank—are you okay?" he demanded, interrupting himself, tone suffused with relief.
EDI considered, her processes working sluggishly. "I think so. Running diagnostic…" The diagnostic returned blank chunks in her cognitive software. Perhaps that was why she felt so slow. "I…I think I am alright, now," she announced, feeling marginally stronger. All she remembered was the terrible Reaper-killing signal before the screaming masses, all of it funneled into the mass relay system until the whole galaxy had been alive with the screams of the long since dead.
Yet she was here, because she was not a Reaper. She had been made with Reaper code, but she was not a Reaper, and the relief that accompanied the thought would have moved her to tears if she had the capacity.
"Are you sure?" Jeff pressed.
"I feel a little unsteady…but I am sure. Yes," she answered. "You should return to the helm…thank you. For coming."
Jeff plainly wanted to argue, but was aware of his duty to his ship and shipmates. He patted one of her processor boxes gently, fondly, then withdrew from the AI Core and returned to the cockpit, while EDI began turning on systems manually, checking each for errors or damage. Apparently her fainting fits hadn't damaged anything, just rattled her and everyone else.
Still, she felt unbalanced, aware of the gaping blank spots in her programming. But the blank spots didn't affect her as she would have expected, meaning she had learned to exist without the bits of Reaper code from which she had been created.
The thought warmed her.
-J-
The geth were sporadic in their reawakening. It was a phenomenon they would study later, the fact that those geth with the most connections to the world, the most relationships, the most reason to be more than just machines, those whose personalities had actualized the most, survived with only minor damage to their programming. Those who had remained isolated, who had least actualized during their first experience of being individuals failed to reboot, or rebooted only to find themselves in a state of semi-functionality; part geth collective, part individual, in a state of neither nor limbo.