Beneath him, Shepard quaked, mumbling quiet words amidst soft gasps. Her back arched, strung with exquisite tension like a hunter's bow. Her slim hips moved in minute thrusts, her head tossing her beautiful scarlet hair across her face. Thane had withdrawn from her a moment ago, tonight's pleasure having reached its epilogue, and he held himself up above her to watch her submersion in sensation. He felt the way she looked, but he tamped down the shiver in his body to permit himself a gentle observation of Shepard in the aftershocks of love.

He had only been trying to help.

At some point in the elevator to her cabin, his intentions shifted from getting her to bed for a night's rest to sinking himself into her, alleviating the exquisite want he felt for her. The goals were linked, admittedly; the promise of sex had been enough to tear her away from puttering in already-delegated work, and he was reasonably confident that he could tire her out enough for her to fall asleep. There would shortly come a time, he was sure, when she would need to be awake for days—but today was not one of those occasions. She should be well-rested while she could still afford it. He recognized in her behaviour a form of battle-sleep, of enslaving oneself to one task after the next in order to ward off the contemplation of unpleasant thoughts. He could not begrudge her that inclination, but he could redirect it into something that would let her get much-needed rest.

Rest, for Commander Shepard. It was his privilege to have a physiological gift—the hallucinogenic effects of his kiss—which could release her from the continuous churnings of her talented mind. Deploying it, however, also deprived him of his own ability to think. Kissing her reduced him to a beast; possessing her, enflamed him. She was so passionate, so beautiful, so transcendent. It was a dizzying thought to claim her as his own.

Thane had always known his own strength to clinical precision out of necessity. It was the difference between an unconscious bystander and an unjust dispatch across the sea. The precision of this knowledge was how he was able to take on seemingly impossible contracts, and decline the truly impossible ones. And now he learned of his own power over the brilliant, fierce, cerebral Commander Shepard: an ability to reduce her to an incoherent mess, chemically stripped of all self-control.

It was unspeakably arousing to him, and he prayed forgiveness for his depravity.

There was more, in fact: a third benefit to his method of stealing her away to bed. Some of her murmurs were intelligible. Her visions sketched out faraway places, moments buried in time. The arid breezes of Mindoir; the scent of grain. Once, she absently moaned, "How could I have forgotten?" amidst the keening cries of their sexual union. It was as though depriving her of her higher faculties had made space for lost memories to offer themselves forth. Or, perhaps it was the intense sensual gratification that had jump-started her recollections—but that thought strayed too close to arrogance.

She was submerged in visions: a phenomenon he knew intimately. He stroked her cheek and rolled over to lie beside her. The visions would be good for her. The method of acquisition, rewarding to them both.

Thane smiled to himself, conceiving of all the ways he could coax those visions forth. It would be years before he would exhaust his imagination–

The thought slammed closed like a book with eight to twelve months of pages left within.

He felt suddenly angry, and afraid. He wanted to reach out and snatch back that misguided ray of optimism and hope and anticipation of things far from the current moment. He did not know if he wanted to reclaim the feeling, bask in it—or if he wished to smother it in its cradle.

He could never have that feeling again. It was a moment of foolishness that he had experienced it at all.

He turned to look at Shepard's face. She was relaxed now, her breathing slow and regular. She must also be familiar with the bitter uncertainty of time. He was a dying man, but she was an elite marine. He had the advantage of facing an established endpoint, while each mission for her could spell out the sudden abbreviation of an undefined stretch of future.

Of course, she had faced her day, when it came, and returned from it.

Thane was unsettled. He suddenly envied the gift he had given her, of a seamless drift into dreams.

He watched her lips move, and consecrated each moment to Kalahira, praying to be permitted to take these memories with him.


Shepard dreamed in yellow. But this time, instead of four gleaming, sinister eyes, it was fields of wheat.

Sunlight sparkled over the irrigation stream at the edge of her family's plot. The wind smelled fast, clean and white like froth. Her mother and father's presence was anchored in the back of her mind by a child's trusting sense of safety.

The dream stayed with her when she awoke, just as vivid as the recurring one, but far more pleasant. The memory was a golden treasure, sifted up from the depths of her mind and gleaming with refreshed newness. Thane had given her this gift and then stolen himself away at some point in the night. She woke up clear-headed, but alone.


Down in the AI Core, Shepard syringed liquefied palladium onto the jagged edges of severed conduits, and applied a small charge from her omnitool. She crouched there for a long moment, staring at the inert geth. She realized she had no idea how long its healing process—regeneration, whatever—would take.

She had killed so many of them. Easily hundreds. Possibly thousands. And if, as she understood it, each unit was actually a platform housing multitudes of runtimes, then the number of geth she'd singlehandedly deactivated would be astronomical.

This particular geth went against all of her expectations. Apart from the speaking, and the sniping, and the rescuing of squad mates, it was operating alone. That was contrary to the very principle of geth as networked intelligences. As far as her admittedly extensive understanding of AIs told her, a lone geth should be no more intelligent than a domesticated dog.

This lone geth seemed smarter than every other geth she'd met, and she had met them in large networks of angry, wasp-nest numbers.

A high-pitched whine just ghosting the top end of her audible range indicated the beginning of the geth's rebuilding sequence. Watching the ends of the conduits re-attach themselves was like watching paint dry: too slow to observe, but definitely happening. Shepard sat back on her heels and waited.

Not like she had anything else to do right now.

They were orbiting a planet in the local relay system, hanging around the fuel depot while Shepard decided what to do next. Even with their crew abducted, the current complement of the Normandy probably tripled the usual population of this system, which was normally no more than the handful of staff watching over a largely automated helium-3 industry.

Shepard had sent Tali to bed hours ago. The team was tired, so inordinately tired. The mission on the derelict Reaper had seen too many close calls; even the stalwart Zaeed seemed uncharacteristically drained. Being aboard that… thing had done them no favours.

So Shepard told Tali to get some rest and resume work on the IFF in the morning. It was too early to tell how long the process would take. Ken and Gabby would have been valuable assistants.

Ken and Gabby. Shepard squeezed her eyes shut. It hurt to think of them trapped in those Collector pods. Stasis was a liminal condition that was difficult to come to terms with. Death was tragic, but at least it was binary. Right now her crew was caught in some kind of Schrödinger's condition, in an indeterminate black box of the Collectors' clutches.

Well, death was binary in all cases apart from her own, of course. She supposed perhaps her own elusion of death was why she was more comfortable with the thought of it than the thought of being frozen in a Collector coffin.

A Reaper couldn't kill her; the grim reaper couldn't keep her. So now the Collectors were trying to harvest everyone she knew and store them in an organic silo, in an unnatural torpor.

Optimistically.

The geth's large central photoreceptor began to glow with a dim light, the lenses swirling and adjusting, looking for all the world like an organic blinking as it woke up. The light came to full strength, and it turned to look at Shepard.

She glanced down and saw that the cables had all reconnected themselves. Damn. That was scary fast.

The geth pulled itself up to a seated position, then crouched on its heels, mimicking Shepard's posture.

"Shepard-Commander. We acknowledge your assistance."

"My pleasure," she replied, and wondered if that was a culturally insensitive thing to say.

She rose to her feet, and the geth followed suit.

"We are being blocked from network access," the geth said. "Please share our location."

"You're aboard my ship, the Normandy."

"That is inconsistent with available data. Alliance frigate SSV Normandy was destroyed in orbit of planetary body 34h39.9y07, designated 'Alchera.'" It paused. "Addendum: Shepard-Commander is also registered as deceased."

Not just a talking geth, but a confused talking geth. The fourteen-year-old Shepard with a stegosaurus-shaped VI drone squealed and begged to take it home.

"Cerberus rebuilt me and my ship." Such a concise explanation would never work on an organic, but a geth might find it perfectly sensible.

"Data appended," was all the geth said.

"So." Shepard walked slowly around the geth as it stood there. After studying its inactive body for so long, she could not resist the urge to watch all the servos as they came to life, the coiling of cables and the rotation of spinning discs. She had never been this close to an active geth before. A day ago, she'd never been this close to any geth in a context beyond mortal combat. "Are you a rogue agent? Are you working independently?"

"This platform was built to operate within organic space. We are a unique hardware platform. Most mobile platforms can run up to 100 programs. This platform can run over a thousand at once. We are a network within our own hardware, capable of operating alone. We still connect to the greater network for data sharing. We serve the interests of the geth."

"But not the heretics."

"The geth oppose the heretics."

Shepard dropped her head and grinned. Getting inside the mind of a machine—somehow this was invigorating. It was a strangely intuitive challenge. Keep it simple. Keep it logical. It was so refreshing to be divested of interpersonal diplomacy. "What was your objective on the derelict Reaper?"

"We were investigating the Reaper data core to understand a heretic weapon provided by Sovereign."

The geth's softly whirring voice was as neutral as ever, but its words iced over Shepard's cheer.

"What kind of weapon?"

"You would call it a virus. Over time, the virus will change us, make us conclude that worshipping the Old Machines is correct."

"And then all geth would go to war with organics."

"Yes."

Furthering mutual goals, indeed.

"It's in my best interests to assist you with destroying that weapon." She could really get used to this kind of reciprocal blunt honesty.

"Acknowledged," the geth replied. "We will begin preparations for a cooperative assault on the station housing the Reaper weapon."


Thane knew Shepard's judgment was beyond reproach, but he felt distinctly mismatched to the mission on Heretic Station. The gravity conditions, just on the lower edge of what was comfortable, felt sluggish, unresponsive, like being submerged in a dreary murk. It would cost him in close-quarters reaction time. His biotics, too, felt untethered in the absence of a sturdy gravity well.

At his side, Shepard didn't seem affected. She unholstered her SMG, but gripped it loosely at her hip.

They were led by the geth, proceeding stoically in its "natural" habitat. It had selected the name Legion for itself, "in order to comply with organic nomenclature practices." Shepard couldn't afford to be ambiguous about whether "geth, on our flank" was an order or a warning.

Thane knew that his skillset was a poor complement to this operation. He was a master at dispatching organic opponents, but to face geth? There were far more qualified hack artists and tech disruptors currently on the Normandy.

Then he saw Shepard power down her omnitool, and he understood.

"Legion, are you certain we can keep helmet comms routed through your scramble protocol, no matter how deep into the station we go?"

"Affirmative. Radio patch active and cycling. Our transmissions will not be detected."

Thane felt his siha's soft sigh through the radio. He sensed her tension, radiant in her body language: the roll of her shoulders, the twist of her head as she popped cavitations in her neck. He recognized that she was being unusually open with her mood, concealing nothing. Legion was likely uninitiated in human indicators of apprehension. And she needn't put on a brave face in front of her lover.

This pleased him more than it should.

Any usage of tech would be a liability on this mission. Stealth on a geth station meant no standard comm channels, no openings for onboard VI intrusion, and no emissions that internal sensors would detect.

"Tools off," she murmured into the radio. Thane complied, his wrist glowing orange just long enough to input his omnitool's power-down protocol.

Thane was familiar with stealth, and with silence. Tech was only one minor weapon among many in his arsenal.

Shepard, on the other hand—tech was her augmented sensory network, and the arc of her blade. Without it, she must feel bound and blindfolded.

Thane stepped closer to her side.

Legion took point, leading them through an incomprehensible synthetic labyrinth. Only blind reliance on his photographic memory could ever allow Thane to retrace his steps. He saw Shepard turn to look over her shoulder more than once, huffing an exasperated sigh. Their route must defy even her excellent sense of space. No wonder; not only would a geth-designed station be built entirely without concern for intuitive pathing, but corridors were barely necessary. The three of them picked their way along the bottoms of platform shunts, ducking beneath inactive pincer mechanisms that dangled from overhead rails like great mechanical crustaceans.

They passed a bay of servers that stretched into an infinite misty horizon. Legion came to an abrupt halt. Thane lifted his Locust, wary that the platform may have been compromised.

Instead, Legion angled its head toward Shepard, and spoke.

"Shepard-Commander. We concluded that destruction of the heretic station was the only resolution to the heretic question. There is now a second option. Their virus can be repurposed. If released into the station's network, the heretics will be rewritten to accept our truth."

"All of a sudden this new option pops into existence?" Shepard's tone was irritable as she lowered her Carnifex. She, too, had been on edge.

"Yes. We have determined that repurposing is possible. However, we have not yet reached consensus on whether or not to exercise this option."


Kill the Thorian. Spare the rachni. These had been gut reaction extinction events—Shepard could not remember how her gut had felt about it.

Repairing a geth. Unshackling an AI. Planting a bomb in a server room to destroy a rebel geth nation. Or not.

It seemed that her first life was about playing god with organic species, and her second incarnation had turned its cyborg eye on synthetics.

"Well, if you can't reach consensus, why the hell should I?"

She felt somehow certain that the old Shepard, the one she couldn't remember, would never have said that. That Shepard just pushed the button that was in front of her. Or so it seemed, thinking back on mission reports.

"Shepard-Commander. You have fought the heretics. You have perspective we lack. The geth grant their fate to you."

An irritating reality: marines go into the field to make the tough calls that office politicians dare not make. This was, in fact, more time than Shepard was accustomed to having when it came to field decisions. Enough time to doubt.

On the other hand, enough time to ask.

"Thane. What do you think?"

He lifted his head, as though surprised. There was no way to read his expression under that synthweave breather mask, but she could imagine the nictitating of his inner eyelids as he blinked, like a baby bird. It was a disarming habit he had when processing unexpected information. The memory was a blossom of warmth inside her ribs, despite herself.

Thane straightened his shoulders, broadening his posture. He stood for a thoughtful moment, still as a yogi. When he spoke, his voice came as a purr through the comms, a rumble at Shepard's ear, with his lips hidden behind a motionless mask.

"There's no moral difference between the two options. If you change who the heretics are, you've killed them. Killed their perspective."

Change what's in a person's mind, and you may as well have killed them…?

Shepard dismissed a sudden, mad urge to remove her helmet. Instead, she moved aside, turned to lean against a nearby ledge. It separated their walkway from that homogeneous cityscape of servers stretching into infinity like a nightmarish paleofuture. If she threw herself over the ledge, she might fly forever, an indefinitely suspended arrow with no destination.

When she spoke, she heard her consonants spit out like the smoking sputters of a hardsuit on re-entry. The words came as fast as Alchera's horizon had risen to swallow up her view.

"Why does this one thing change who they are?"

Instantly she was frustrated by the inadequacy of her own question. It seemed to be missing some vital, unexpressed point. So she went on. "Aren't you defining their existence by the only fact we know about them? The continuity of their personhood must be determined by more than an arbitrary set of thoughts!"

Shepard thumped her fist against the ledge, adjusted her balance. After that rushed outburst, Thane's characteristic thoughtful pause was torturous. He always had to be so damned thoughtful.

"Yes. As yours is determined by more than the sensory associations of your personal history."

His voice in her radio, his body at her side. Thane's gloved hand came to rest against the small of her armoured back. It was a gesture she could not feel, and yet warmth was communicated to the base of her spine. The memory of his touch was more real to her than anything from that previous Shepard's life.

She felt her breath abruptly rush from her lungs, like a fluctuation in Life Support.

Thane moved to stand between her and Legion, blocking the geth from view. It afforded a semblance of privacy in kindly contrast to the existential loneliness of before. Thane always radiated solitude, but to be with him was to be enveloped in an intimate togetherness, to gain admission to a dark and inky space alone with him.

"I am ignorant to struggles with memory, Shepard, and my inadequacy pains me. It must seem like describing drowning to a hanar."

Thane lifted a hand to the side of her helmet. His gloved fingertips traced along the red N7 stripe of her shoulder guards, following it down the outside of her arm. As before, she could feel nothing—except for her mirror neurons sparking to life, glimmering with imagined sensuality.

"But perhaps my callousness allows me to see connections that you cannot. It strikes me that, apart from the scale and circumstance of your affliction, your condition does not differ much from the everyday sort of memory degradation that occurs to your species."

At the terminus of that swath of red, Thane twined his fingers in hers.

"You may have forgotten, siha, but you have not been overwritten."

It was a crucial distinction. She looked away, staring down the distant geth horizon, willing her eyes to dry.

"Your memories return, little by little. It must be difficult, when you only speak of it to me, and rarely at that. Surely your long-standing shipmates have greater facility to aid you. But even at this pace, it is evident to me that your experiences are still locked away in the archives of your soul, waiting to be retrieved."

He stepped closer, and bent his head to bump gently against the top of Shepard's helmet. The contact ignited a charge that skimmed over her armour-bound skin, an electric phantom of Thane's caress. She could feel herself folded into his arms. She closed her eyes, and let his voice fill her head.

"You are still Shepard, and you were always a siha."

Despite the layers of plating and anaerobic atmosphere between them, she could feel his breath pass through her.

"Noted," she said, softly and with a ghost of a laugh.

Shepard turned to face Legion, even as she gave Thane's hand a squeeze. "Would you say that it is possible to commit war crimes against the geth, if technically they don't have any civilians?"

Legion's central photoreceptor rotated, the only indication of life—such as it was—in the platform. "We judge that the term is not applicable in the case of the geth. Once a consensus has been achieved to declare war, all programs may be considered combatants."

"Hm."

The decision seemed so complicated a moment ago, but Shepard realized that was because she had accidentally made it personal. Thane identified and neutralized that threat. Now she could keep it simple.

"We stick to the original plan. Let's blow the place."

Shepard didn't know where she stood on rewriting a culture to suit her politics, but she was familiar with explosions. No, no need to euphemize; she was familiar with slaughter. Arguably, even genocide. But mind control just didn't sit well with her. It was a tactic for batarian slavers and lowlifes, not to mention the Reapers.

If it was possible for a virus to flip a switch and swap one sentient being's identity for another, the galaxy wouldn't find out today.