* * * Luna, Debrief * * *

It was the M-35's use of an oversized MEFG that allowed the non-flying APC to be capable of "kangarooing" without using fuel, and to meet Normandy part of the way to orbit, instead of requiring a full touch-down (among other things.)

Though a procedural improvement over landing the frigate, the process was not automated.

Liara wanted to be in the hangar when the Mako returned, but Kobunde was adamant: Recovery was a sensitive and potentially hazardous operation, and she would have to watch from the display in the main mess. The asari was happy to accommodate, thanked him for his patience, and left immediately for the safe viewing area in the main mess.

What she saw was a view from the aft bulkhead camera near the overhead, looking forward out the now-open hangar door; the Loadmaster's head was visible at the bottom of the display. A tiny dot, trailing a plume of fiery red and orange shot from bottom to top, and was out of sight. The stars visible out the open hangar door moved downward as the ship steered upward, until the return jets on the Mako were visible again. The flame went out just as the APC dropped into view, steering jets appearing from the vehicle's sides, strobes on the APC flashed white.

Spotlights inside the hangar snapped on, panned and tilted to the Mako, illuminating it.

Only as it began to sweep up from below did Liara realise the hangar door had dropped open further when she had not been paying attention to it. As the door approached the wheels of the Mako, six claws, three on either side, swung up from the catapult rail segment, seized the Mako by its wheel hubs, straightened it out with respect to the launch catapult, and pulled it firmly into place on the hangar door, which was now flat to the deck again.

Red lights around the inside of the hangar flashed green three times, and then switched to yellow. The Mako was drawn into the hangar atop the "carriage" to which the capture claws were mounted, which was in turn on rails that ran all the way aft; as soon as the bow end of the Mako had cleared the Kiggs field, the hangar door began to hinge closed.

The interior lights flashed green three times again, and then switched to Daytime Operations Lighting.

Kobunde – somewhat dramatically – flipped a large mechanical toggle, and gave a thumbs-up. Liara could see him speaking as he turned his head, but the feed didn't include audio. On the other hand, she saw the hangar door finish its closing, and felt a slight reverberating klunk-kadadt-klunk through her feet as it did.

Lights on the Mako switched off, and the two hatches must have dropped open at the same time; the ground team began to pour out: Tali and Garrus from port, Wrex from starboard, then a pause; Ash emerged from the port, the last of the Mako's lights switched off, and Shepard dropped out of the starboard side, Kaidan from the port.

Watching them head aft, presumably to the main lift, she got up and walked to the lift door, standing far enough away from it so as to allow them to come out easily.

She waited.

Nothing happened.

She waited some more.

Nothing continued to happen.

Corporal Jenkins came sauntering around the lift passage. "Ma'am? Are you waiting for the ground team to come up? They're probably going to want to get back into shipboard fatigues, and they might want showers, which are just forward of engineering. You may not be able to talk to them until after they get done with that."

She smiled with embarrassment, looked away with a nod. "Of course, you are right. Mister Pressly had said as much when I asked him earlier. Thank you for reminding me."

At that, the lift door dropped floorward, and the entire ground team was revealed, still fully armoured.

Shepard was speaking, "–reminds me, who's got the cores we salvaged from the last room?"

Tali held up a small, fat briefcase. "Six."

The door reached the floor, and the team began to file out and follow Shepard up the port ladder.

"And those are inert copies, right?"

"Yes." the quarian's responses were terse; she seemed upset.

Liara touched Kaidan remotely, using just a single Lucen of biotic energy to get his attention through the unpowered kinetic armor.

With his helmet retracted, he was able to turn his head easily and see her; he smiled instantly. "Oh, hey Liara. We're going to do a debrief, and then I'll be back down to get out of my armor. Or is it something urgent?"

"Ahm, no…I suppose not. But I'd really like to talk to you when you have a few minutes."

Kaidan slowed, letting the rest of the ground team get up the ladder ahead of him. "Would you mind if I showered first?"

"Not at all; I'm grateful you are always so willing to talk with me. Please message me when you're available; I'll be in the medlab."

The debrief was brief. Shepard had already prepared the timeline, and the ship DCE had matched up all the data from the team; once this was uploaded to Hackett's office at Trident, Shepard presented his team to the Admiral, along with the case of core copies.

Hackett was appreciative and offered praise to each team member. Clearly he had been very well briefed in advance, or had been monitoring the mission in realtime.

As the holo darkened, Shepard almost beamed at them. "All right, great work, everyone! Hit the showers, have a meal, or both, but not at the same time. I've been summoned to the doctor's, so don't hold a stall for me."

The room cleared quickly, except for Tali.

Her mask hid the glower in her expression, but her posture clearly showed disapproval.

Shepard didn't balk. "You're still unhappy about my having that "live" compute block, aren't you?"

"'Don't give a loaded weapon to a child,' is a maxim that I think transcends languages," Tali said.

"If it's any comfort, I was not going to give it to anyone if they get what they need from one of the core copies. But I do want to hold on to it until I find out if Hackett gets all he needs off it. Otherwise I'll have it sealed in resin and make a nice trophy."

"And I suppose you'll label it, 'That time I almost saved humanity from their own AGI?'"

# # #

Wrex and Shepard had been the only ones injured; Dr. Chakwas promptly put them "on the bench."

The krogan seemed amused and indulgent of the human doctor fussing over him. "I'm going to let the automation finish you up," she indicated the various manipulators on the rail that had extended from the bulkhead. "When it finishes, you are welcome to go get something to eat, which will help you heal. But if you have any questions or concerns, you are welcome to stay and ask me, even as I am working on the Commander."

Wrex shrugged. "All right."

Karin turned and took one step to the next bed.

"And now you, you troublemaker," she said to Shepard. She looked to her right at the displays. "Did you feel anything while this was working?"

"No." His left arm was up and rotated, exposing the inner arm from elbow to armpit; though he was on his back, he felt unusually vulnerable. "Kaidan Medi-Gelled it right when it happened. What are you seeing?"

"It looks like it fragmented at that first impact. Like you took a shotgun shot under your arm." The holoviewer obscured her eyes, but she moved her head to make parallax work for her. "What wasn't shot away...mmh...really took a lot of shrapnel. You said it reflected off your shields to this unarmoured zone?"

"That's what Kaidan thought."

"Hmm…" Karin continued to move her head around as though trying to get good visualisation on the fragments. Without another word, she reached to her right, selecting an instrument without turning her head from the injury, began lightly touching specific areas of the injury with it to conditionally re-liquefy selected millimetre-wide columns of Medi-Gel, giving her access to the fragments without permanently disrupting the reforming tissue.

Replacing the first tool, she selected long-tine microforceps, reached into the injury with them, and began carefully extracting the fragments one at a time and dropping them into a stainless tray she had placed on the exam table; each landed with a faint "tink."

She spoke as she continued to work. "It wasn't something the AI had weaponised against you, was it?"

"No. I had hit the rocket with pistol fire as it was taking off, and the resulting explosion threw off these fragments. My armor took most of it."

"How close were you?" tink

With a grunt, Wrex rose from the exam table, thudded over and turned his head to peer over Karin's shoulder silently as the work continued.

"Four, five meters. It was taking off relatively slowly at first," tink "using a staged rocket cobbled together from seismic survey charges." tink

Karin shook her head. "Mmh. They mostly went through muscle and fatty tissue. You don't have any synthetic lipocytes or apidocytes, do you?" tink

It was less question and more observation.

"No, just myocyte augments; Monsanto-Helros. And not a lot."

She continued,"That combination may be part of the problem; and organic ones can be kind of stupid. Oh..." She shook her head, "There's no need to whitewash it; they are stupid because they're not purpose-biogineered. They're using cytokines to signal for repair, but your older tech is having to fight with them." tink "I've stabilised them, but even after I rebuild all this, I'll thank you kindly not to have any adventures for the next hundred and thirty hours or so." tink tink

"Never got that upgrade. I had more pressing issues."

"I should send you to your room for that kind of wilful ignorance," she chided him half-seriously. "Fat cells are very important, it's one of the reasons Sirta has a product for it." tink "True, it's not on the UBR list, but you not knowing what they do and why it's important is not" tink "an excuse. If you're trying to maintain a particular morphology, synthfat can communicate directly with your bloodstream compute, and release leptin in response to conditions you decide." tink "Make you keep your BMI exactly where it needs to be to fit your CEVA suit."

With a not-subtle sigh, the krogan turned and thumped out to the main mess for a meal. The door glided shut behind him.

"Does the Alliance have it?" tink

"Until last week, they did not. But now they do, and so I am on a crusade."

"Oh, well, a crusade. Right, then. What do you need from me?" tink

"Your say-so, Commander."

"Granted."

"Thank you, I'll start a batch for you." tink "The sooner it's installed, the better."

"How many fragments are in there?"

Dr. Chakwas sighed. "I haven't counted. But I suspect that whatever you were hit by had been microfactured, and probably very quickly." tink "When it broke up – I imagine as it ricocheted – it fractured into more pieces of microshrapnel than it would have had it been built well." tink "As I said, it looks like you took a shotgun hit."

"Can't you just let them metabolise out, or get absorbed?"

"We can if you don't mind not knowing what it was printed from," tink "and having it lurking around inside you, ready to cause mischief an some inopportune time." tink

"All right, you win that one," Shepard relented.

"Not quite. We both win." tink

Shepard smiled and nodded.

"Don't wriggle." tink

"You're not making it easy. But very well. I think I can say you definitely won that one."

Chakwas remained focused. "But I'm glad your work took so long. We need to talk. Privately."

"Uh oh."

"Indeed. I wanted to talk with you about your…uh…implant modifications." tink "I'll come straight to the point, Stephen. It seems you're using it a lot more than I had hoped, at least at this time. I had hoped to wean you off of it completely. Have you tried walking when you feel depressed or melancholy?" tink

Shepard smiled, at first because it was funny she hadn't seen him doing so, and then bitterly, because it hadn't helped significantly. "Of course I have. I read the newsbit you had sent, and I" tink "thought it might work. It's part of what got me interacting with the crew more…though the ship is so small, it's hard enough not to get to know everyone, I've since discovered that most of these folks I already" tink "know, or have served with previously. Though it helps also because I've seen more of this ship because of it."

"Not that I'm saying this is bad, but if you don't want to be known as an 'management by walking around' type, have you tried it in PVR?" tink

"Of course. I tried a walking path exper [experience], and a Nordic skiing exper. Takes too long, too easy to get lost in it, forget that I've already got" tink "more to do than I have time for. But it did get me thinking about something else, and it did get me focused on the future because of the walking forward stuff. If it's any" tink "other help, I haven't noticed."

"How long have you been doing it?"

His ARO prompted him the answer. "About a week after you sent it. Call it" tink "eight months at this point. It was easier to walk around while we were outfitting at Arcturus, but I've managed to keep it up." tink

"So you're not sure it's helping. Is your VI smart enough to have an opinion?"

His ARO took a couple of seconds to generate the list and display it. Shepard studied the list of benefits it had catalogued before noticing it was all subtle stuff. He looked instead at the percentages it showed, and their comparisons to optimal values.

tink

"It is…and it seems it is helping, but not a lot. Nothing over one percent, and few things over half a percent. Better than not doing it, though. There are other benefits."

"Do you have any idea why your use would have gone up and not down?" tink

Shepard shook his head gently, not enough to disturb the doctor's work. "Not a bit. Though I don't suppose Eden Prime helped, or" tink "getting suddenly drop-kicked into to my first command, or made a Spectre and doing more field operations all of a sudden."

Now it was the doctor's turn to chuckle. "Yes, I suppose there's that. But it doesn't seem to be the same kind of stress you use the 'Talos' app for." tink

"You mean the usage on that is showing higher, even including the past month? It's been too busy for me to even remember actually using it."

His ARO displayed a list of all the times the talsit app had been engaged, and the particulars of each use. "Hm. Well, that's more than I thought." tink

"How might we make it less frequent?"

"It's a stress mitigator. My brain acts up when under stress, and this is a way to give me control over it."

tink

Karin sighed. "Don't forget: you're actually giving that app control over you."

"I have more control over that app than I do over my current brain. At least, more than I do without it.

"Don't you trust your own brain?" tink

"After all it's been through? With as much trouble as it makes? How could I possibly?"

"Then let me toss this out for your consideration. One of the things the Gen Nines are supposed to use is Mandeltech." tink "Have you heard about it?"

Shepard's ARO displayed Mandeltech: nanotech that relies on Mandelbrot geometry in its node assemblies.
Advantages: Added robustness and stability; also makes related nanotech even smaller, allowing for more compute per cc.
Disadvantages: Makes the structures slightly more brittle, unless the material is pliable. Slightly higher averaged power draw.

tink

"I'm not upgrading to anything that doesn't let me keep the finer level of control. I'm not handing that over to VI, at least not in the foreseeable future."

"I'm not proposing you do a full upgrade," tink "but you could install components where they might do some extra good, replace the older components. A partial upgrade, and only of the hypervisor substrate in particular." Tink

"Do you think that's relevant? Would it help?"

"One of the things the Mandeltech nodes offer is expanded Hypervisor council. Because each node manages its own metaconnections, it forms HVIs by default. You can task them with some of what you've been doing manually." tink "In the past month, for example, it might have been able to help modulate your usage with smaller doses where needed. Any given Mandeltech node has enough autonomy to assess the area of effect," tink "and more finely control nanodoses."

"You think the industry is catching up to the finer-level control that Gen Fours through Sixes had?"

Karin smiled to herself. "You didn't think that your stubbornness in clinging to old tech would make its advantages somehow yours alone forever, did you?"

"No, I suppose not."

The doctor pulled her head obviously up and back, tilted this way and that, leaned it closely again and then back. She turned and selected a sensor from the instrument tray again, and waved it over his arm several times. "All right, then: It looks like you're clean. Now let me dress that and give you another firm direction to have no adventures for the next hundred and thirty hours. I simply won't tolerate you messing up all my lovely work."

"Yes, Doctor. I assume I will still be allowed my daily exercise?"

"Don't you 'yes, doctor' me. I mean it." She sprayed a layer of NuSkin on the injury, reactivated the Medi-Gel, and then laid an AutoPad over the area, taped it into place. "I know you get all gung-ho in the field, you did it with Jenkins. You may have saved his life and his leg, but now he'll be in weekly rebuilder therapy for a year if he's lucky. My advice is to sling that left arm for the next eighteen or twenty hours."

Shepard wasn't watching her work, he was watching her face. He considered how fortunate he was to have her as his CFS, not just because she was aware of his personal and technical issues (and wasn't above bending rules to help him,) but she was both fast and meticulous.

"Richard said you had told him I'd have made a good medic. After watching you work again, I'm not so sure."

She nearly smirked, throwing a glance his way. "No need to go fishing for compliments, Commander. I know what makes a good CFS, and what makes a good combat medic. You'd have been good at it, but you wouldn't have liked it: You lose too many. Still, your tendency to stop and offer aid anyone – even fallen enemies – is exceptional."

"I do what I can." Shepard shook his head. "Though I suppose it'd be nice if more would do it."

"Fewer wars?"

"Mmh. Probably not, but a bit less overall death."

# # #

Liara turned as the black-haired human stepped into the hangar, carrying his armour toward his locker, and wearing only a towel around his waist and socks on his feet. "Oh, Kaidan, I would really like to talk with you if you have some time. Have you eaten since your return?"

"Not yet," the biotic smiled readily. "It's a little late, but I'm really hungry. After I get this secured, you want to eat with me?"

"I would enjoy that, but I have already eaten. However, I would be happy to just sit with you while you eat, and perhaps we can talk while you do. If…that would be acceptable."

The armour only took about a minute for him to hang in his locker; Kaidan pulled on fatigues before loosening the towel and tossing it into the sorter on his way to the lift door. "Sure, that'd be great." He threw a smile over his shoulder as he led the way to the Main Mess.

"When I was on Thessia getting outfitted with my amp/tool plus integration, there was someone named Qoreen – a facility attendant who maintained the cleanerbots, as far as I could tell – who kind of took me under her wing. In hindsight, I don't know if she just took pity on the poor bewildered human, or if it was actually her job to do so, to make me feel more at ease, but it helped a lot, and I really appreciated the time she spent listening to me talk about my experience as a human biotic, and coping with the strange planet I was on, offering insights into asari city cultures and so on."

Once in the Main Mess, he had approached one of the printers, and had held his hand up at the sensor as he was speaking to Liara. A few seconds later, the sensor glowed green, and the printer began to hum and whir busily. "Anyway, I understand some of what you must be feeling, and I suppose this is my chance to pay it back."

Liara smiled. "I hope it's not an imposition, but I am very grateful."

"Not an imposition at all." As Kaidan took the tray of food to a bench and sat. "So what's the fuss?"

Liara sighed heavily, and then sat, "I had never imagined that half the things in How Must They See Us were actually true, but this vid show, 'Updater' seems to revel in them. I shouldn't be at all surprised to discover it created some of them.

"The protagonist is an asari named Kantha T'Iar, and there actually is such a person, she is a Spectre, and she looks like the actor who plays the role. I suspect this was deliberate, but I cannot imagine why anyone would be so foolish as to expose a Council agent so obviously.

"Richard asked me if I had seen it – and so shyly when he did, it was very endearing – and when I said I had not heard of it, he asked me if I would watch some of it with him. He wanted to know how true it was.

"I found out after all this that his religion has descriptions of spiritual figures called 'angels' that he finds very similar to asari, and so I think he was hoping I would tell him that these things are all true. Ultimately, I think he was hoping that by doing so, I would actually validate his religion.

"We expered the pilot episode, and I was…well, I…I didn't know what to say to him, other than to try to explain that most of it was true, but mischaracterised. I could tell that he was mildly distressed to learn this, but I simply had to say it…"

Her expression became one of actual shock and horror. "And that line… after the human Varick Sandoval defends her, kills her attacker, and then pulls her to safety to treat her injuries, she says, 'How will I pay you back?'"

"Goddess." Liara shook her head in disbelief, "It was…exploitative, and…I…I didn't know what to say. No one would say that, no one would do that, at that level of…permission! It was so clearly meant to exploit human biases, and if this is all the exposure someone had to Thessia and asari cultures, they would think we are…" Liara stopped herself, and paused to take a breath…and change the subject slightly.

"I asked him if he had more questions, could he speedwatch subsequent episodes to find them, and without PVR. He was actually glad to be able to cover more issues, and I was relieved to not have to exper more of it at real life speeds."

Liara took a breath and recentered herself. "And RichardJenkins…Richard…kept asking me if asari can really do that, every time Agent Kantha would meld with Varick Sandoval at range." She looked distraught, "Which was at least once per episode! What could I say? Of course, 'Yes, we can do that, but only an exploiter, a…nymphomaniac actually would.' But it seemed like he had stopped listening as soon as he heard the 'yes!'"

Kaidan had been listening attentively, nodding where appropriate. At her last, his nod turned slightly melancholy. "Yeah, well…Rich is a young guy. His priorities are different; one might say 'immature.' Certainly more hormone-driven. But storywriters know this, and exploit it. When you're that young, your motivations are a lot more driven by influences you barely understand. Emotions are closer to the surface and more intense than when you get a little older. And cynical writers know this, so they cater to it to attract watchers and followers.

"Also, realise that the human is the protagonist, at least to people like Rich. Varick is a stand-in for them, the character with whom Rich – and others like him – will most readily identify.

"And I think your just being there with him to watch that show will break a lot of the bad ideas it pushes – at least for him – because he'll see that they're largely untrue. And also because you're so clearly mortified at being misrepresented. The unconscious mind can be a powerful influence, even if it takes time for it to really get going. You see, he'll remember all the fact-checking you provided, even when he's not thinking about it consciously. It might even be a good idea to watch another episode of it with him, and laugh at it. And encourage him to laugh at it, too."

"But it's not funny! It's terrible! No asari would act like that with a human that young; he hadn't even 40 years!"

Kaidan nodded, "Remember, humans reach sexual maturity before they're twenty; fourty is considered mature. It's about a third of a human lifetime. And that's part of the appeal. To a human, Varick is the protagonist, the 'everyman' character that the target demographic – which Richard is squarely in, I might add – finds appealing and relatable.

"Just…keep speaking the truth to him. Eventually, he'll get it, because the show makes him want to believe you. Because you're asari. You are – as a species – everyone's wet dream."

"'Wet dream?'" Liara looked puzzled. "You make it sound like he thinks we are Swimmers."

Kaidan's Asari Interaction VI caught the unintended misunderstanding before Liara's did. "Oh…'Swimmers' are what you call your ancient ancestors, like we have 'cave men.' So, no. Not because he thinks you are 'Swimmers.' Sorry. 'Wet dream' is an idiom; it's a…kind of lucid sexual dream occasionally occurring in human young, and diminishing over following years."

Liara nodded; she was already aware of the term. "Of course."

"Anyway, be patient with him. I think he's getting transferred pretty soon, so you won't have to put up with him for long."

* * * Glossary * * *

APC: Armored Personnel Carrier

ARO: Augmented Reality Overlay

CEVA: Combat EVA

CFS: Chief Flight Surgeon

EVA: Extra-Vehicular Activity

exper: verb used with reference to PVR; as one "watches" a video, one experiences or "expers" a PVR presentation; also used as a noun for such a presentation (e.g., "did you exper the last episode of Updater?")

MEFG: Mass Effect Field Generator

PVR: Polyphase Virtual Reality; a total-immersion VR technology with between two and five channels of data that stimulates multiple regions of the brain, allowing for a nearly complete reproduction of environments or experiences. Because it is a demanding, high-bandwidth technology, it became a measure of network capability, particularly among users who depend upon it. PVR games can be very addictive, particularly to the young.

UBR: Universal Basic Resource, a pool of non-monetary resources like food and water and transport that various municipalities provide in varying degrees to all inhabitants

VI: Virtual Intelligence, or "Narrow" Artificial Intelligence

A/N: Had some fun with this one, adding in "canon" stuff from Andromeda. The "How will I pay you back?" is something one of the asari MP characters says when revived by a squadmate (which I retconned to be a referential quote from Updater,) and the "How They Must See Us" is mentioned in an in-game email you get from Cora (I think.)

Liked the new Dune, though I will not enjoy waiting for more of it.

Really liked Free Guy; seems like the first movie since I, Robot that didn't treat AGI as purely a bad thing. If you haven't seen it, you really should.