Mass Effect 2: Loose Ends

by Steadfast3

The Collectors have been destroyed. Commander Gardner knows that, soon, he will have to turn himself into the Systems Alliance to face judgement for his work with Cerberus. However, Just because the Collectors are gone and the Reapers have not yet arrived does not mean the galaxy is any safer. There are loose ends to tie up, and Scott's team will be with him the entire way.

3. Chapter 3 - Atlas

Atlas

The entrance to Atlas Station took us through a high waterfall and into a clearing just beyond it. The enormous blast doors now lay unblocked, and as we approached, they began to part ways, opening the way for us to disembark inside the entrance of the station.

"Archer told us that they brought a lot of Geth platforms here from Prometheus Station," I said to everyone, "expect heavy resistance."

"Wouldn't be any fun without it," Grunt chuckled. The entrance opened to an elevator and we all stepped inside. The place was dark and silent, situated underground and I started to have a bad feeling about this station in my gut. At Prometheus Station we had seen the Geth bodies lying around before they had come online, but there was nothing to be seen here in Atlas. The only evidence that there had been anyone here at all was displayed to us when the elevator stopped and let us out, revealing yet more Cerberus corpses. My team moved past them and looked back at the dozen or more bodies,

"Looks like they were trying to escape," Garrus said.

"And got slaughtered like animals," Jacob put in, "but where are the Geth?"

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the faint blinking of a light and I saw the security camera,

"I don't know," I said, "but the VI knows we're here."

Exiting the entrance room, we stepped out into a hallway with large bay windows that looked down into a massive room several floors below us. In the centre of the room was a colossal machine with an energy field contained in its centre. The energy field was unstable and from where we were it looked like an electrical storm was raging within, arcs of electricity shooting out and zapping the walls and windows.

"That's the VI core," I told everyone, "we need to get down to it as fast as possible"

All thirteen of us ran through the hallways and offices to find a way down. However, just when I was thinking about how fortunate we were that there were no enemies holding us back, I suddenly caught a glimpse of something on a computer screen. The image of the green face then spread to every other screen around us and, in an instant, it began screaming at us from the windows as well.

The words were fuzzy and distorted, none of us able to make out what the VI was shouting. The pitch of the voice would go up and down, from sounding almost Human to sounding like little more than deep, static roars. Every time it opened its mouth and yelled its hidden message, it sent chills down the spines of each and every one of us. I had seen a lot in my time, but this was proving to be a uniquely horrible experience. I could not tell if I was hearing anger or sorrow in the VI's voice. When my squad and I reached an elevator and pressed the button to go down to the first floor, the terror only increased.

As our elevator descended it suddenly and violently lurched to a stop, sending half of us crashing to the ground. Inside the cramped lift, the voice of the VI only grew louder and its blank, staring eyes glared out at us from the two control panels as it threw the lift back up to the floor we had come from. However, it did not stop there. When the elevator reached the seventh level where we had all gotten onto the lift, the VI then sent us shooting down again. In between the second and third levels the lift screeched to a halt and had us all flat on our backs again.

Up and down, up and down the VI sent us like a thriller ride at a theme park, throwing us up in the air and violently crushing us when the elevator dropped quickly down the shaft again. Only, unlike at a theme park, there was a very high risk of death on this ride. We were helpless, trapped inside the confined space while an angry VI seized control of it and knocked us around mercilessly. After a particularly bad plummet and sudden stop I had been left on the floor feeling like one of my legs had maybe been broken, but when the VI was on the ascent again I felt it slow down substantially before coming to a steady and graceful stop,

"Thank… God!" Miranda muttered.

"Why is it stopping now?" Kasumi asked.

"We have gained access to the elevators systems and have acquired limited control," Legion said to the team, "we will attempt to take us to the first floor."

"I love you, Robot Man," Jack wheezed as she regained her breath. Legion brightened all of our spirits and we helped each other to our feet as the elevator grinded its way down to our stop. We were ready to get the hell off this fucking elevator.

I felt a wave of bliss come over me when I stepped out of the elevator into a large laboratory. Among the rows of work-stations and computer desks I spotted a bigger terminal in the centre of the room, the unit stretching from the floor all the way to the roof. Upon investigating, I figured that it was the master control terminal,

"Do you think we can shut it down from here?" I asked Tali. After a quick scan with her Omni-tool, she looked at me,

"I honestly don't know. But it must be something important."

I reached out to the panel and quickly said to my friends,

"Be ready guys, it wouldn't surprise me if this thing ended up summoning a Reaper."

"Unwise topic for jokes," Mordin quipped. When the rest of the team had set up a perimeter around the control terminal and were covering all the entrances to the room, I placed my hand on the console.

Everything changed immediately. A fierce burning sensation raced through my body, every part of me was in agony and I wanted to scream. However, there was no air in my lungs to shout with and I was unable to pull away from the console. Then the room around me began to change as well. Everything became… virtual. I felt my cybernetic implants flare up and I felt as if my skin and muscles were being scorched. I looked around to my friends, but I could not speak to them, nor could I understand what they were saying to me. Then, not of my own will, I started moving.

My feet moved me across the room quickly but clumsily. I was taken by some invisible force through an open doorway which then slammed shut behind me before any of my squad could follow. I heard their voices scream out for me, but I did not turn back, just kept heading forward. Down a long corridor I moved, the virtual world in which I was stuck making everything look as if it was charged with electricity. Pulses of energy moved through the walls, floor and roof around me and everything glowed with a dim orange light.

A Geth appeared and I was able to fight off whatever was controlling me to take it down with my pistol. Or perhaps my unknown puppet master allowed me to fight the Geth off. As the synthetic body fell, I stumbled to the side and into another lab, falling to the ground as my balance left me. I felt terrible, confused and completely out of my depth. As I reached for the nearby table to drag myself up again, I saw a flicker of movement over in the far corner of the room and as I watched, a group of virtual figures began to appear.

Three men, one of them Gavin Archer, were gathered around a Geth platform that they had on a rail attached to the ceiling. On the floor was a fourth man, rocking back and forward gently on his hind, mumbling away to himself.

"The Illusive Man wants results Dr Archer!" one of the men said angrily, "so far you've failed to deliver."

"Until now," Gavin said coolly before turning to the younger man on the floor, "David, could you please tell the Geth to take a few paces forward?"

While I watched, Gavin's younger brother stood up and uttered a series of clicks and static sounds, and to my complete disbelief, the Geth unit tried to take a few steps while its feet dangled in the air. The other two men were astounded,

"How… how can he do that?"

"My dear brother here is severely autistic, and a mathematical savant. He can comprehend the Geth language in its most basic form, understand their phonetics. With his photographic memory, cross-referencing the meaning is a snap! He's literally a Human computer."

Even as he spoke there came a response from the Geth and David translated to the Cerberus men,

"The robot says hello."

"This is unbelievable!" the second man said excitedly, "why have you not reported this?"

"I myself only discovered that David could do this a few days ago," Dr Archer replied with a satisfied look on his face, "and since then we have been working non-stop to find a way to integrate his mind into the Geth neural network. I promise you, the Illusive Man will have his results."

As the images flickered and began to fade David sat down again and began to mumble once more, but this time I could hear him and realised that he was rambling off equations to himself,

"The square root of 906.01 is 30.1. The square root of 912.04 is 30.2…"

He continued on until the vision disappeared entirely, leaving me disorientated and dazed. I was struggling to establish what was real and what was simply a vision by now.

Even though I seemed to have regained a bit more control over my own body again, I still felt compelled to keep going forward instead of turning back for my squad. As I approached the door on the far side of the room, another flash of orange light appeared to my left and just like before I saw a vision begin to assemble itself. David stood idly by while Gavin worked on a computer, reciting square roots as if he had them all memorised. Gavin turned from the computer and walked past his brother with a data pad in hand,

"David, could you repeat my notes from Thursday's experiment?"

"Square root of 918.09 is 30.3," David continued to mutter.

"David!" Gavin said in annoyance, "please pay attention!" David shrunk back from his brother a little and put his hands to his ears,

"Loud. It's getting loud in here." Gavin moved to his little brother and comforted him, speaking in a delicate tone,

"I'm sorry, David, you didn't deserve that. Would you mind repeating my notes from Thursday's experiment?"

"Log one-thirty-seven point three," David said, sounding exactly like his brother, "the experiment yielded no discernible patterns of Geth obedience. End dictation now. Bloody hell, the Illusive Man will have my head for this."

"Thank you, David," Gavin said thoughtfully, "and how are you feeling today?"

"Square root of 924.16 is 30.4… earplugs would be nice."

Whereas before I had come to see Gavin Archer as an overall decent man, focused on his work to prevent any future bloodshed between the Geth and Humanity, I now hated him. His brother had no idea what was going on around him, feeling safe in the company of his older brother while all the time simply being part of the experiment. Even as I moved to go through the next door, all of the computer screens suddenly flashed on and the VI's face appeared, staring at me from all over. But this time when it screamed and shouted it chilled me to the bone,

"Please… Make it stop! It's too loud!" David screamed at me. Every time we had seen that horrible, staring face and heard its angry screaming we had thought the VI was threatening us, maybe telling us to leave. Now here I was listening to a poor, terrified man plead for release from the VI, David was screaming, begging for my help.

No doubt, the VI part of his mind was the part fighting us while his Human mind was overloaded, his conscious being crushed beneath the power of the neural network. With renewed urgency, I ran through the door and found myself facing the VI core, the swirling ball of energy barely being contained as I braved the arcs of lightning that shot out around the room. Another image fizzled into view between the VI core and I. I heard David's weak, scared voice crying softly. However, I could not see any trace of the young savant,

"The square root of 906.01 is 30.1. The square root of 912.04 is 30.2…"

Dr Archer stood by the machine and gave an affirmative nod to a technician next to him,

"We're ready. Open a connection to the Geth network." The technician punched in the commands and immediately there was a blinding surge of energy from the machine,

"QUIET!" David yelled out. From all sides Geth suddenly appeared and grabbed Gavin and the technician,

"David, no! Call off the Geth now!" Gavin pleaded to his brother.

"Quiet… please make it stop!" David said in a heart-wrenching cry.

The vision faded and the VI core suddenly sent bursts of energy all over the room, narrowly missing me several times. From above I heard an announcement from a computerised voice,

"Node acquired, Normandy SR2 in range. Upload commencing."

I felt the fear grip me as I realised that the VI was trying to get itself off world again, using my ship. If it was able to take control of the Normandy, and maybe even EDI, the damage it could cause was scary to even contemplate. I had to bring this thing down, I had to break the VI down.

My friends had been separated from me and I did not have the technical skill to do anything with my Omni tool against such an advanced virtual construct. But I did have my guns. I unleashed the firepower of my Mattock at the energy field of the VI core, and in the semi-virtual world that I was currently in, I could see the distortions and disturbances in the currents. I could see the data streams snaking their way around the VI core as it tried to upload itself to my ship. With every shot that I fired into the field, the data seemed to reset or transfer to another stream only to start the upload again. Electricity sparked all around the room and when one actually hit me, I was knocked right down on my backside, the smell of burning filled my nose and I could feel my cybernetics under my skin like they were aflame.

I burned through the ammunition for my Mattock quickly, unloading everything I had at the VI. Eventually, after too many uncomfortably close calls with arcs of lightning, I heard David scream out again,

"Make. It. Stop!"

The blast from the VI core hammered me into the wall and the room went completely black as if I had passed into some empty, lifeless void. The virtual world that had been all around me faded away and I was brought back into the real world. I was still wheezing on my knees when one single light flickered on over the top of the VI core, and for a tense few seconds I thought it was about to start up again.

However, all remained quiet and when I looked up I could see what the energy field had been containing. I felt physically sick as my eyes came to rest on David. He was strung up to the machine with wires attached all over his body, bored into his skin and bone. There were cables going into his mouth and down his throat. Where they ended, I did not want to know. Probes had been inserted into his eyes, the eyelids pried back to keep them open and along his arms there were multiple nodes which had been pierced all the way through from one side of the arm to the other. This ghastly sight made me feel weak, almost unwilling to look at it any longer. However, past all the atrocities, I could see that David's eyes were frantically moving back and forwards, tears began to pour down his face,

"Quiet… please," he whimpered. I had to get the poor boy out of this nightmare, but I found myself standing idly and staring at the scene of misery before me. How could things like this ever be allowed to happen?

Strangely, I found myself thinking of Ashley Williams and a conversation that we had once had back on the Normandy SR1 back in the days of Sovereign. She had told me that she believed in God and held to her faith very strongly. I was not religious myself, but I had absolutely no qualms with anyone who was. Everyone has the right to make their own choices and follow their own beliefs. But now, as I stood and looked at David, both his body and mind shattered by this demonic project, I wondered how anyone could believe in higher powers if things like this can happen. If we were created in God's image and were his chosen people, how could some of us possibly inflict this kind of horror on another Human being?

What made it even worse was that this was not just any regular member of staff that Gavin used as his "volunteer", this was his little brother. His own brother! Family was extremely important to me. To think that someone could inflict this kind of atrocity on their own kin was beyond horrifying. Given the choice between putting Sophie, my own sister, through agony, or submitting myself for the process, I would gladly volunteer myself. While I stood rooted to the floor, I heard the door behind me open and footsteps come closer to me. Then I heard his voice,

"Commander… please don't do anything rash."

My hand gripped my rifle tightly and I turned to Dr Archer, my finger barely a hair's-breadth from pulling the trigger,

"Rash?" I growled at him, "you mean like hooking your own brother, your own family, up to this thing? I should shoot you right now."

Gavin stood still as he realised that I was more than serious about what I had just said,

"Please Commander… the scientific benefits of this project are worth more than any of us could imagine. And you don't know the pressure that the Illusive Man was putting me under!"

I got right up in his face,

"Nothing is worth this! You've destroyed your brother, mentally and physically. Do you honestly believe that this is worth it at the cost of David's happiness?"

"If I can save a million mothers from mourning the deaths of a million lost sons, then yes," Gavin said to me.

"I saw his memories!" I told him, "he begged you not to do this! Don't you even care about what you've done to him?"

Dr Archer had nothing to say and he stayed silent as he peered at his brother. I let him linger, making sure that he saw how monstrous his decision to use David was.

I had never wanted to kill anyone in cold blood so much before in my entire life. In my mind's eye, I even saw myself raising my rifle and executing him there and then. However, as Gavin started to see his brother as more than just a tool in his experiment, I could see that he was already suffering inside.

"What I've done to David is unethical," the Doctor finally muttered, "but if he dies then it is unforgivable. Please… let me take care of him."

"So you can continue using him as a lab-rat?"

"A well cared for lab-rat."

"No," I said, "Cerberus doesn't care about people like him. To them he's just a tool, an object. I'm taking him away."

"And where would you take him? Where can he go?" Gavin asked, not believing that I would have an answer.

"Grissom Academy," I said, "it's an Alliance school for the most gifted minds Humanity has, without the torture and enslavement." Gavin was furious,

"No Commander, Overlord must continue…"

My fist connected with his jaw and Gavin dropped to the floor like a brick. Even as he fell, I heard the door open again and saw my team enter this nightmarish scene, all of them shocked to their cores by what they were seeing. I grabbed Gavin by his shirt and pulled him roughly to his feet,

"Get your brother out of that thing now," I warned him.

"What is this?" Tali said as she came up beside me, her voice subdued and shaky.

"Something that can only come from the darkest part of a person's mind," I replied. Gavin spotted Miranda in my assembled team and tried to reason with her,

"Operative Lawson, surely you understand what has to be done. You brought Commander Gardner back from the dead. Would people not consider that to be crossing a few lines?"

Miranda looked at him with contempt,

"I'm not Cerberus anymore, and I never would have allowed anything like this to happen on any of my operations! Don't you dare compare me with a monster like you."

"We should just fucking kill him," Jack said and Zaeed began to fidget with his rifle, eager to squeeze the trigger on the helpless Doctor.

"Face it, Doctor," I said to Gavin, "you're wrong about all of this. There has to come a point where you see that you've gone too far. The Illusive Man didn't want me to destroy the Collector base, but to keep it and use the technology for the betterment of Humanity, but it would have been wrong. And now you have a simple choice. Help us get David out of this, or fight this and die. Either way, David goes free. What's it going to be?"

Gavin Archer accepted defeat and we soon had David out of the repulsive machine that he had been kept prisoner in. Despite everything that Gavin had put him through, the young autistic man seemed to cling to his older brother as if for protection, ironic. I had EDI send a signal to Grissom Academy asking for them to send a shuttle to pick up David as soon as possible. I only said that I was a Spectre and not that I was Commander Gardner, but I suspected that both identities would draw much suspicion anyway. I had seen enough of Gavin Archer to last me a lifetime and I simply told my squad to leave him on Aite from where he could go wherever he wanted, I did not care and I did not want to know. My priority was caring for David back on the Normandy and transferring him over to the shuttle sent from Grissom Academy once it had arrived.

Project Overlord was certainly worthy enough to have taken action on, but unlike the destruction of the Collector Base, the Heretic base and other missions that I had proudly completed, I did not feel any sense of satisfaction from what we had done. David was indeed safe and on his way to a better life, but the horrors of the whole project had engraved themselves into my mind. The rest of the crew were the same and despite the mission being, on the whole, successful the atmosphere on the Frigate was somewhat diminished for the next couple of days. There were some places that science should simply not venture, some things that organics should never discover.