Chapter 2 – "Castor"
This story started out as an example of a 'misapplied trope'. Playing through Mass Effect 3 for the first time as a male Shepard, I quickly reached the point where The Illusive Man is sitting in front of his display as a mysterious man walks towards him and stands behind his chair. Obviously this was TIM's new right-hand, now that Miranda had defected. My first thought was (and I literally said this out loud), 'Oh crap, they cloned Shepard!' As players we later learn who this mysterious man is, but that first impression stuck with me throughout the rest of the game.
When I mentioned this mistake to my good friend (who is a certifiable Mass Effect fanatic), she laughed and said how awesome it would have been if that were true (along with questions regarding my mental state). When I explained the reasoning behind that assumption, she agreed that it was something TIM would have done. Subsequent conversations expanded on the idea, forming a basis of how it could happen and the implications. Throughout these conversations she insisted that I had to write it out. Well, this story is the result (note, she helped with the plot seed and some of the details. But even she doesn't know how this ends insert maniacal laugh here).
"Brother! Welcome home! It is always good to meet another member of the family."
Shepard stood in stunned silence as around them the men began cheering and clapping. Liara had been mostly right. All the males were the same age, height, and build but, more importantly, they were all… Shepard.
There were small differences, of course: a scar here, a darker complexion there, different hairstyles and facial hair, but on a fundamental level they were all him. What is going ON here? Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the enormity of what he was witnessing crashed down on him. They're all… me. Two of the men on the platform reached down and pulled Shepard up with them, clapping him on the back and inspecting his armor.
"Strange clothes you wear, brother. What are those meant for, rolling down hills?" The crowd of men laughed heartily. "And is this your wife? That's an odd hairstyle, but to each their own, right?" One of the men nudged Shepard in the ribs. "Well, regardless, I'm sure the womenfolk will want to talk to her straight away. Come, tell us your name so we can greet you properly!"
Shepard was silent for a long moment, still grappling with the shock. James looked like a caged animal, head turning this way and that while his hand seemed a twitch away from drawing his shotgun, despite being utterly ignored by the crowd. Liara just stood still, as stunned as Shepard. Finally, Shepard shook off the friendly encouragements of those around him and stepped forward. "My name is John Shepard, Co…" Before he could finish, the crowd roared "WELCOME, BROTHER JOHN!"
"Excellent, now that you've been welcomed we'll find some lodging for you and your lovely wife, and your escort can return to the stars. Tomorrow we'll add you to the work rotation and show you around our community."
"Wait, my escort?" Shepard asked, puzzled.
"Certainly! Your friend here can't stay", the man said, pointing towards James. "He's not part of the family. Don't worry; it was the same for all of us. It will be hard to say goodbye, but we all went through it and you'll quickly find friends among your new brothers and their families."
"Commander, what's going on here?" James asked with a note of panic in his voice.
An idea popping into his head, Shepard hopped down from the platform and pulled James close as if into a farewell hug. "For now, let's go along with them." Shepard whispered into James' ear. "I want to get to the bottom of this. Head back to the Normandy and have EDI focus her scanners on the village and the fields around it. Something else is going on here and I want to know what."
"You sure, Commander? There's a lot of them, I mean, you… gah, you know what I mean!"
"Go, James. We'll stay in contact and if it looks like trouble, we'll call for help. Till then, stay on the ship and keep an eye on us."
After a moment, James stepped back, saluting and saying "Yes, sir" before turning and making his way back towards the landing zone. Shepard turned back towards the crowd.
"SHEPARD!"
Shepard heard Liara's shout and noticed a swarm of women taking her by the arms and pulling her towards one of the buildings.
"Wait!" Shepard called and tried to rush after them, but was restrained by several of the men.
"That's women business, Brother John. We don't get involved in that. Don't worry; your wife will be fine. I'm sure they just want to throw her a welcoming party. Come, you've got your own party to attend!" What that, Shepard was pulled towards a communal building; a pre-fabricated structure nearly opposite from the one Liara was being drug to. Shepard watched helplessly as they were pulled apart, Liara's pleading eyes meeting his until the door closed between them.
Shepard spent the evening fruitlessly trying to gain information from the men. They were more than willing to talk of course, in between drinks of some sort of sweet nectar. The problem was they didn't know anything; terms like Cerberus, The Illusive Man, and the Alliance brought nothing but blank stares or attempts at humor. 'Reaper' was apparently the name of one of their agricultural implements. Even mention of other races like the Turians and Asari causing nothing more then odd looks and calls for more drink.
All Shepard could gather was that the village had always been here, and that each of the men had been brought here individually with their wife and an escort who had left immediately afterward. No one knew where the escorts went after leaving except that they 'returned to the stars'.
Without an orbiting moon, and in an equatorial climate without obvious seasonal changes, time keeping was sporadic and unreliable at best. The calendar was primarily based on crop rotation, with four cycles called Plant, Tend, Harvest and Fallow, each of which lasted as long as the women said it did. The working day lasted from sun-up to sun-down, with no indication as to how long that took in standard galactic time-keeping terms.
What Shepard did learn in abundance were the rules of the settlement. Men were expected to work in the fields during the day, with periodic breaks for water and food, except when summoned for a task by the women. The women handled all affairs in the village, including cooking, cleaning, and repairs and maintenance. During the Tend and Fallow cycles, at a time determined by the women, each man would be called into the clinic for a health assessment. Otherwise, interactions with the women were forbidden except at night with his wife, and only with her consent.
Shepard began to feel his attention drift and his vision begin to blur. Am I that tired, or is this drink some kind of intoxicant? Alarmed, Shepard tried to rise to his feet, but stumbled and fell. The men laughed and some of them helped him up. "It's always like that at first, Brother John. You'll be used to the festival drinks by the time our next brother comes. Here, we'll help you to your bed. I'm sure your wife is there waiting anxiously for you." Barely able to shake his head in denial, Shepard was lifted by two of the men and carried out of the building and into another, with a darkened main room and separate bedroom. The bedroom had a large, two-person bed and a pair of dressers, but little else. The men helped Shepard, barely conscious, out of his armor and into the bed before quietly closing the door and returning to the party.
Struggling for consciousness, Shepard dimly heard the soft grind of gears as his bed slowly lowered into the floor.
"Careful, he's waking up. Check his restraints, quickly!"
Shepard groggily awoke to the sound of feminine voices around him. Attempting to sit up revealed that he had been secured to some form of canted examination table with his head slightly higher then his feet. A quick assessment also revealed that he had been bound with straps around his ankles, wrists, thighs and chest. He was not wearing his armor nor, he noted with a touch of embarrassment, anything more then a pair of boxers.
Looking around, Shepard found himself in a modern medical lab. A variety of instruments around him glowed with bright displays and blinking lights. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. But where is this? His eyes finally focused on a group of women studying him from behind a bank of computers and a protective glass wall. He recognized several from the gathering the previous night, but what struck him now were the lab coats the women wore, specifically the Cerberus logos on their sleeves.
"Where am I? What am I doing here?" Shepard groggily demanded.
"We were hoping you could tell us that, Commander Shepard." One of the women, slightly older then the others with brown hair tightly pulled back into a bun, stood up from the console. "Did the Illusive Man send you here? My understanding was that Project Lazarus and Project Gemini were to have no interaction with each other. Has that changed?"
"Project Gemini?"
"You don't know, then?
"Know what, that you've been making copies of me? Cloning me and storing those clones here on this backwater planet for who knows how long?" Shepard futilely struggled with his restraints. "What have you done with Liara?"
"Your pet Asari is safe, for now. Whether she remains that way depends on your answers. Now, how did you find this place?"
"Dumb luck. Now let me see her!"
A shock ran through him as electrodes on his temples fired. Shepard gritted his teeth to prevent a scream from escaping. "Not just yet, Commander. We're not done here. Your presence may yet prove useful, but for now you're a spanner in the works and I need to determine the best way to extricate you without damaging things further."
The woman, who Shepard decided to call 'Hairbun', waited for Shepard to stop shaking from the electricity before continuing. "Now, you claim you found us by 'dumb luck', but what are you doing in this sector anyway? There are no Collectors here for you to fight, Commander, no Prothean ruins to explore; just this inconsequential pile of rock that just happens to be in the right place and composed of the right things to support human life."
Shepard shivered as the tingle from the electricity finally subsided. "We were running from the Reapers, looking for resources, allies, anything to slow the Reapers down until the Crucible can be built."
The women at the console gasped, turning to each other, their voices overlapping. "The Reapers are here? Already? No, that can't be!" Hairbun slapped the top of the console, shocking the scientists into quiescence, before turning back to Shepard. "The Illusive Man assured me personally that we would have time to complete Project Gemini. What happened?"
Hairbun's voice rose as her agitation increased. "We received new clones every month on schedule, in accordance with the plan. Then nine months pass without a single word; no communications, no new clones, nothing! Now you, the progenitor, show up out of nowhere and declare that the Reapers have invaded and that you, our best hope and the sole reason behind both Projects Lazarus and Gemini, can't do a thing about it?"
"Maybe we can help each other, Doctor…?" Shepard asked.
"My name is Doctor Samantha Martin, Commander. I am the lead researcher here and the commanding officer over Project Gemini. As you've no doubt surmised, these panicked hens are my research assistants, as are all of the members of this research installation. And yes, before you ask, we are all female to prevent confusion among the men. The last thing we need is for them to start asking why 'that guy' doesn't look like the rest of them, after all."
"The men, the… clones; they're all clones of me, aren't they? How long have you been doing this?"
"Your genome was compiled from your corpse at the beginning of Project Lazarus. Project Gemini began as a fallback option should Project Lazarus fail, as seemed increasingly likely in the early days of the project, before Commander Lawson was assigned to the project."
"If you can't resurrect me, clone me? Either way, the Illusive Man gets his Commander Shepard, right?"
"That was the plan at first. Then Project Lazarus began to make strides and its projected chances of success rose. Project Gemini was nearly scrapped until I approached the Illusive Man with an idea. Why have just one Shepard running around when we could field an army of you, each with all your skills and Lazarus-enhanced abilities"
Shepard winced, once again appalled at the depths the Illusive Man, and Cerberus, would sink to in order to further their goals.
"That was the plan, and the Illusive Man agreed to it. Project Gemini was officially cancelled and was wiped from all Cerberus records. Only I, the Illusive Man, a small team of cloners at the Womb facility and the researchers we chose to monitor the clones, would have any knowledge of the project."
Dr. Martin became more animated as she continued, obviously enjoying talking about her work. "Clones would be grown in an accelerated process over the course of a standard galactic month and would be given a basic level of understanding and cognitive function through neural implants and subliminal training. Once capable of cognitive thought and action, they would be delivered here with a paired researcher for study and basic training."
"What about the children? Did some of your researchers succumb to my charms and fall for their research subjects?" Shepard asked drily, still trying to comprehend what the director was telling him.
"Eugenics experiments, Commander, nothing more. We were interested in seeing what else your genes could produce."
"How do you expect farmers and laborers to command ships and men in war, Doctor? These aren't the kinds of things that can be crash-taught in a classroom."
"A valid point, and one my colleagues brought up. Initially, the plan was to replicate your education and experiences, at an extremely accelerated rate of course. This failed when we realized our files regarding your life and interactions were too incomplete to adequately replicate your life experiences."
"It was the Illusive Man who brought us an answer. His research into the Protheans had uncovered a previously unheard of ability they apparently all shared: the ability to store and share memory and experience through touch. Similar to your report on your experience with the beacon on Eden Prime during the skirmish with Saren, a Prothean could touch an object, biological or synthetic, and instantly know its entire history and function."
"Somehow, the Illusive Man found a way to imitate this process and created a device that could scan an item, or in this case a person, then imprint that knowledge and detail on another. This is how we would create multiples of you, Commander."
Dr. Martin paused for a moment, letting Shepard grasp the implications of this technology before resuming her story.
"Of course, the first trials were failures. Apparently your body's last memories were of suffocating and disintegrating after the Collectors blew up your ship. Not the best memories to wake with, I will admit. Those clones suffered horribly, convinced they were still dying alone in space. We had to put them down."
"We eventually learned how to selectively edit your memories, to filter out the undesirable parts and leave only the parts that make you, Commander, an effective soldier. Our second stage of trials went better, but was still a failure. It turns out that, when confronted with multiple exact copies of themselves, the clone's first instinct was to eliminate the others. The bloodbath was quite shocking, really."
Shepard could only listen on in dull horror.
"Finally we settled on the current 'Crèche' plan. We found a remote, isolated planet capable of sustaining human life with only a basic level of technology and created this settlement. We created a template personality, altered individual details enough to prevent a repeat of the second test, and then used the modified template on the third set of test subjects. The subjects proved docile and willing to accept their lives as colonists and farmers, as you witnessed above. We maintain them in this 'Tabula Rasa' state to protect the integrity of our tests and allow the eventual personality wipe to happen smoothly."
"Wait" Shepard interrupted harshly, "what do you mean, personality wipe?"
"Once we receive the call from the Illusive Man to join the fight, we'll wipe the template personalities, load the modified combat personalities, and send them out to fight for humanity!"
"You're crazy, all of you!" Shepard shouted, struggling even more fiercely with his restraints. "It's bad enough you cloned my body. You're saying you cloned my mind as well? And, and, took an eraser to the parts you didn't like? WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT!"
"Expedience, Commander. Just as expedience will ensure that you won't say anything to the subjects while you're here. We wouldn't want a repeat of the second trial now, would we?"
"What makes you think I'm going to quietly go along with your plans here, Doctor?"
"You won't have a choice, Commander. We've confiscated your weapons and armor, as well as your communicators, just as we did with your companion. Tomorrow you will wake up, go to the fields and work with the other subjects. We will keep Dr. Tsoni here, so that she can perform her duties like a good wife. You will have an opportunity to talk with her in the evening."
Dr. Martin returned to the computer terminal before looking up, as if she had forgotten something. "By the way, I wouldn't recommend trying to contact your ship. Just because we don't have any obvious defenses here doesn't mean we're entirely defenseless. Should your ship decide to break orbit or send another shuttle down, please know that you and your Asari friend will be dead before they touch down."
"And please don't try to run. We wouldn't want to have to send the clones after you."
Looking down at her console, Dr. Martin pressed a button before looking back up. "Now, I think it's time for you to sleep. You have a very busy day tomorrow, Brother John."
Shepard felt the prick of a needle against his neck, before consciousness faded for the second time that night.