The Lazarus Project – Wilson
6 days, 5 hours after subject brain death
–
Just seven hours after saying 'yes', and Dr. Eric Wilson was Operative Wilson. The speed boggled his mind as he stared blankly at his new life. Hard to believe it was only that morning he had been in his office at the Nuredin company headquarters, nursing a cup of cheap coffee and trying to pull order out of the week's data for less money than some doctors made fresh out of school.
But look at him now. Half a galaxy away in a med lab on a secret space station. His lab. His mouth hung open as he let his fingers trace over the sleek surface of a cutting-edge HEMRI imaging station worth more than his entire Nuredin lab put together. Brand new. The sort of technology only found at the largest government-owned laboratories, the sort of technology that always had a two-year waiting list to use. And he had one of his own. The rest of the lab was the same – no expense had been spared. None. Wilson felt like a God among scientists.
"Eric," a voice said, snapping Wilson out of his reverie. He turned. A young, dark-skinned man, armored from head to toe, held out a friendly hand. He smiled disarmingly, revealing straight white teeth.
"Wilson, please," Wilson corrected, shaking the proffered hand.
"Of course Doctor. I'm Jacob. I'm the project's head of security, but at the moment I'm here to make sure you have everything you need." Wilson raised his brow and looked back at the humming array of equipment already in place. Smartly-dressed Cerberus workmen were still carting more of it in, installing each piece with an almost robotic efficiency.
"I'm… not sure," Wilson admitted. "It is going to take me some time to get a proper accounting of the lab setup."
"With all due respect," Jacob said, voice serious, "we would like you to begin immediately. The subject will be arriving in a matter of hours."
"Yes, of course," Wilson agreed, eying the chief of security warily. Jacob looked official, but Wilson had little doubt he was only a message-boy for the real powers behind the project. And a spy, probably. Normally Wilson would never hazard a guess aloud before he had all the information he needed ('brainstorming' in public was an occupational hazard when one was an industrial scientist – you never knew when your words would be misinterpreted by the less scientifically-inclined), but he decided he'd try to give Jacob something official-sounding to bring to his superiors. He put on his best scientist face.
"Getting the patient to a state of total senescence as quickly as possible is critical to mitigating cellular damage," he said seriously. "If your superiors have any hopes of recovering the subject's mind, they will not drag their feet." Jacob nodded. Wilson scanned the room out of the corner of his eye until he'd come up with a piece of equipment Cerberus hadn't thought of. It wasn't easy. "I am going to need low-latency snap-freeze cryo equipment. Bigger than the ones here. Two chambers, at least, big enough to freeze a krogan. Big enough for me to work inside of the chamber if need be. SMI Med-tech manufactures a suitable model."
"You'll get it," Jacob promised without hesitation, typing the order into a datapad.
He did get it. It took less than an hour.
8 days, 1 hour after subject brain death
–
Wilson rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as he flipped to yet another scan. Shepard's damage was extensive, worse than his contact had indicated when he'd been offered the job. A normal doctor might have been petrified by the sheer magnitude of what was being asked, but Wilson was not a normal doctor, and that was why Cerberus had chosen him above any other. He'd made a career out of pulling patients through the deadliest, riskiest operations known to medical science – he was not a squeamish man. He tirelessly went down the list, noting each scar, each fracture, and making a plan.
He'd worked almost nonstop since Shepard's arrival. The man had arrived frozen in an insulated medical chamber, and Wilson had wasted no time in getting him as stably preserved as possible. He'd thawed the body just long enough to take a few key tissue samples before snap freezing again, flooding Shepard's body with a supercooled fluid spray too quickly for dangerous ice crystals to form. Now, technicians carefully operated on the blue-tinged human popsicle that was the former Commander Shepard, drilling through rock-hard flesh, inserting tubes, walling off nonessential body parts. The technicians were quiet and competent and followed Wilson's orders without question, freeing him up to think.
It was no small job, even for him. He was one of the galaxy's foremost experts on the cellular mechanisms of death and on controlling reperfusion injuries, but it was by no means an exact science. A single mistake was all it would take. Wilson had paid for his rare expertise with many failures, working with Conatix to develop the first human biotic implants. These days the attachment surgery was routine, no more dangerous than any other, but back then, when the groundwork was being laid, most biotics never left the table. There had been no guide to follow – even if Conatix had been inclined to ask experts like the asari, human brain structure was simply different than the blue-skinned aliens, however alike the two species' faces might have been. It had taken a great deal of trial and error to even reach the most rudimentary success, and even then Conatix had pushed on. Amps were implanted deeper and deeper into the brain, and each procedure they tried carried a greater risk that they might nick something critical and leave the patient mentally crippled or dead. Wilson had lost count of how many patients had died on one of his operating tables.
But Wilson was at the head of a growing field of doctors who understood death was not the end of the game. With the proper equipment death could be seen as just another illness to be understood and fixed. Preparations could be made before high-risk operations to neuter death before it happened. Load the brain with cocktails of sugary preservatives and senescence signals. Only cut at low temperatures, in low oxygen environments. Drug regimens and immunosuppressants to shut off reperfusion mechanisms. There were a dozen little steps to be taken, and Wilson had had ample opportunity to find them all. It had taken time, but once he'd arrived at a standard process, it had become a simple matter – patients who died during surgery could be calmly resuscitated up to twenty minutes later with relatively little permanent damage, giving him ample time to finish the implantation without the chaos that usually followed a flatlined ECG. To Wilson, the brain was a beautiful, glorious machine to be broken and fixed. Controllable. Understandable. Science at its purest.
Wilson had killed hundreds in his lifetime. And Wilson had brought hundreds back.
Still, nothing of this scale had ever been attempted before. Shepard had been dead for over a week now. Shredded by an explosion and suffocated in the vacuum of space, not merely nicked somewhere in the brain. Even though Shepard's body had frozen in space, preventing a great deal of cellular dieoff, there was a chance his injuries were simply to severe for repair. And Conatix hadn't cared if the biotics forgot their parents' faces, or algebra, or anything else, so long as they were fit to reenter the program after implantation. Cerberus cared. Wilson would have one shot.
He poured himself another cup of coffee and kept reading.
10 days, 8 hours after subject brain death
–
He did not meet Miranda until his fourth day on the job, during the middle of an operation. Wilson sat, engrossed in a console display as high-precision surgical robots drilled at the exterior of Shepard's frozen brain. The machines were better surgeons than organics could ever hope to be, but they still made mistakes, and it was important that they be supervised. Luckily, Miranda did not intrude, and simply took a seat at the far end of the lab. Wilson could feel her prickling gaze on his back through the rest of the procedure, and he was greatly relieved when the robots had finally finished and folded back up into the ceiling.
He stood, pretending to stretch his neck as he got a better look at her. She was, needless to say, the most strikingly beautiful woman he had ever seen, a fact which put him immediately on guard. Wilson was not a rich man, but he had been well-off enough working for Conatix and, later, Nuredin. He had fallen for spoiled, vacuous women with pretty faces in the past. It was an expensive mistake, and one he did not intend to repeat. Still, no reason to be uncivil.
"Operative Lawson," he said finally, approaching and offering his hand.
"Operative Wilson," she said (almost bored), and rose to her feet. She ignored his outstretched hand and walked past him to stare at Shepard's frozen remains through the window. Wilson frowned at the slight but said nothing. "I apologize for my absence," she said. "In the future I will be overseeing your work more closely, but I understand speed is essential in these early steps. I trust you will do your best until I am ready to supervise." Wilson's frown deepened at her condescending tone.
"Right… Where did you attend medical school?" he asked.
"I didn't," she replied immediately. Wilson frowned. This woman presumed to tell him what to do without even having gone to school? He was going to be 'supervised' by some spoilt rich girl who thought she understood processes that had taken him years to master? Apparently intuiting his reservations, Miranda turned and fixed Wilson with a disapproving gaze.
"That is why you're here, Operative Wilson," she said testily. "I am not a medical expert… yet. Our benefactor is expecting you to know what to do until I am." She turned back to Shepard, all business again. "What are your thoughts on Shepard's condition? Can he be saved?"
Wilson mouthed dumbly for a moment, still trying to piece together the last thing she'd said. She wasn't a medical expert yet? "So… what?" he asked after a moment, "you're just going to read medical journals until you think you're ready to boss me around?"
"Answer my question." He frowned again.
"What do you think? What does your reading tell you so far?" he asked, well aware he was treading on thin ice but feeling too petulant to hold his tongue. Miranda sighed.
"I would be inclined to suppose it was too late." She pointed to some of the scans Wilson had hung on the walls, which showed Shepard's shattered skeleton, collapsed lungs, and more. "His injuries are too severe. Though I have been focusing on basic anatomy so far, I have read your work on resuscitation after brain-death, and none of your successes had been in such a critical state."
"Irrelevant," Wilson insisted, feeling immensely relieved to have caught her in a mistake already. "Superficial injuries, the lot of them. Vast cellular degeneration is a problem, but not insurmountable. Shepard is salvageable," he promised her. "His body, anyway. We can replace most of it with cloned tissue or cybernetics when we're good and ready."
"It appears I have some more reading to do," she said calmly.
"The real problem," Wilson insisted, tapping on a scan of Shepard's skull, "is right here. As long as he's frozen he's more or less preserved, but as soon as we thaw and start cutting, we're going to start losing things. Memories, skills. Even mental capacity. We've been careful, and we got him loaded with channel blockers, but when Shepard wakes up, he isn't going to be Shepard." He turned to grin smugly at her unsatisfied face.
"That is unacceptable. Our benefactor was clear, he wants Shepard back as he was."
"It isn't going to happen," Wilson said, rubbing his forehead in frustration. Talking to non-scientists always gave him a headache. "It's impossible."
"How much would it cost to bring him back perfectly?"
"It isn't a matter of cost," Wilson insisted. "It's a matter of possessing equipment that doesn't exist! It's a matter of basic biology!"
"How. Much. Would. It. Cost?" Miranda repeated, as if she were talking to a particularly dull child. Wilson sat down and massaged his temples.
"I'll humor you," he said. She waited patiently for him to continue. "Memories, mental activity, everything going on in the brain. It's all membrane voltages," he explained, not looking at her. "We keep Shepard entirely frozen, those voltages stay where they are. We thaw him, they equilibrate and go away. Nanosurgical techniques exist to put them back if we know what they are supposed to be, but we don't. We don't even know how much they've equilibrated already. We want a chance of restoring his mind, we'd need a way to measure all those miniscule voltages before we even started cutting. Billions of them. And we'd have to do it all at once, without unfreezing him. But the R and D needed to make an instrument like that… Who knows what'd it'd cost? Half a billion credits?"
Miranda looked contemplative for a moment. Wilson just watched her. It was funny how much less pretty she looked already. "There are things you can do without touching the brain?" she asked eventually.
"Lots," Wilson confirmed. "But again. It'll take time but it's kid's stuff with this kind of equipment. We fix circulation and detox problems first, then once we turn him back on and have him on full level life support, fixing his body is just tightening up the bolts until it can fix itself. Spinal cord is probably shot – we'll grow him a new one. Half of these things can just be replaced, if we wanted. The brain's the hard part."
"Get to work, then. Leave the brain alone for now." She started to walk away. God, she even looked condescending from behind. Wilson looked away, listening to the retreating click of her heels. She stopped. "Oh, and Wilson?" she said, her voice full of false sweetness. "Don't talk back to me again. I'm in charge, not you."
101 days, 17 hours after subject brain death
–
Luckily he did not see Miranda for some time after that. Unluckily, it was four in the morning (or what counted for morning on a deep-orbit space station) when she finally returned. He was awakened by one of the lab techs.
"Operative Wilson, there's something you should see," her voice was worried.
Wilson glanced impatiently at the little digital clock on his beside shelf. "He's dead," he grunted, batting her away. "He'll still be dead in the morning. I'll see to it then."
"Operative Lawson has returned with some new equipment. She's doing something to Shepard's head right now." Wilson swore and tossed aside the covers, his opinion of Miranda bottoming out. In charge or not, he was not going to let some untrained daddy's girl wreck his project with hands that had never done anything harder than apply makeup evenly. He had gone to bed in his work clothes and so rushed right out the door, the worried technician in tow. He stormed into the labs, red-faced and furious.
"What's going on?" he demanded, forgetting her warning the last time they'd met. He marched up to the glass window that separated Shepard's clean-chamber from the bulk of the analytical equipment. Miranda stood behind Shepard's head, clad head-to-toe in baggy yellow plastic. She gave him a cocky grin from behind her mask.
"Operative Wilson," she said. "I was hoping you would finish your beauty sleep and join me."
"What are you doing?" he asked desperately. "Are you sterile?" She frowned.
"Of course. I'm not stupid." She pointed to a shoulder-tall steel box she had wheeled into Shepard's room. Buttons and panels glittered on its front surface. Wilson did not recognize the machine's function, even when Miranda pushed it behind Shepard and pulled a cylindrical dish on a levered arm down over his scarred face.
"What is it?" Wilson asked, rolling up his sleeves and heading for the sink. Miranda's movements were practiced and careful – at a glance he might have mistaken her for a second-year surgical student – but he still wasn't going to trust her not to mess up all he'd done so far. You didn't become a surgeon by reading, you just didn't. It was impossible.
"Your scanner. Our engineers call it PIT." She leaned back and pressed a series of buttons with mechanical precision. PIT started to emit a noisy hum as it roused. "It generates microscopic mass effect field pairs randomly inside a predefined matrix," she explained, raising her voice to be heard over the machine. "The polarity of the interference field generated between each pair allows it to calculate the voltage between them. Calculate for a few billion fields over the course of a few minutes and we get your voltage map."
Hands washed, Wilson pulled his clean suit on and thrust the helmet over his head until the seals engaged with a sharp snap. "You're kidding me." He couldn't believe his ears. PIT's humming was drowned out as he stepped into the cleanser and it obligingly doused him in streams of harsh, fast-drying antiseptic.
"I am most assuredly not kidding," Miranda assured him as he stepped into the clean room, the last of the antiseptic fumes still roiling off of his shoulders. She turned the monitor atop her spectacular scanner for him to see – a beautiful 3d image of Shepard's brain was assembling itself as each point was calculated and added, one by one.
"The resolution?" he asked, his jealousy and anger momentarily forgotten behind rapt curiosity.
"Nanometer scale." The dots continued to appear, color-coded to indicate voltage. Wilson's jaw hung open as he zoomed in the image until he could see the rough silhouettes of individual cells being traced out.
"No adverse effects?" Miranda shook her head.
"Extensively tested. This version has no adverse reactions, physical or psychological, in any human control group." PIT gave a satisfied beep and the scanning dish over Shepard's head retracted. The image was done. Wilson mouthed dumbly, searching for the words. "Impressive, I know," Miranda supplied, smiling smugly. Wilson nodded.
Son of a bitch...
344 days, 4 hours after subject brain death
–
"I swear, she's out to get me," Wilson groaned, rubbing his face with the heel of one hand. "She's gonna kill me someday, I just know it." Across the table from him, Jacob laughed. They were sitting in the station's small mess hall eating lunch. Normally Wilson ate alone at his desk before getting back to work, but today Miranda had, in one of her increasingly-frequent paranoid tantrums, kicked everyone else out of the lab so she could work on Shepard alone.
"You'll be alright," Jacob promised, biting into some kind of freeze-dried bar.
Work under Miranda was exhausting. What she lacked in medical expertise (a lack which was shrinking every day) she made up for in drive. She kept Wilson and the medical techs working like a well-oiled machine, all the while juggling her other work for Cerberus and the reams and reams of medical texts she managed to go through every week. Wilson began to wonder if the woman ever slept.
At first he'd doubted her – it hurt his pride to think that anyone, however smart, could skip right past medical school and two decades of experience just by reading – and yet Miranda seemed to think she had done just that. Soon she started overruling his decisions, infrequently at first, then more and more.
The worst part was that he couldn't fault her. He wanted to believe that her ill-gotten knowledge would just be somehow inferior to his own (all the more so when Jacob let it slip that she'd been genetically engineered in utero), and yet each time they argued, each time she overruled him and chose some treatment over his, he found himself begrudgingly coming to agree with her. He would stay up late trying to find some flaw in her reasoning, but it always eluded him. He was wrong, she was right. She was... better than him. She was smart, beautiful, talented, driven. Perfect. And no matter how he tried, Wilson couldn't seem to get her out of his mind. It was keeping him in a very bad mood.
"I guess so," he admitted. "Maybe I'm just tired. Been at it a whole year."
"You'll get there," Jacob said with his usual optimism. Wilson couldn't help but smirk. He took a bite of his own meal, chewing thoughtfully.
"Know what I need?" Wilson asked after a moment, "A break. Go back home. See the family. Spend time with people who don't have ice in their veins, dead or otherwise." If Jacob appreciated the joke, he didn't show it. His face was suddenly serious as he set down his food.
"I can't let you do that, Wilson."
"I can't have a day off? Damn, Jacob, I've been at this eighteen hours a day for a year now!"
"The project isn't done," Jacob said quietly, averting his eyes. "You can't leave the station. I'm one of only four people on this station with clearance to leave. Everyone else, I gotto keep here." His head bowed in shame. "I'm sorry Wilson. Those are my orders."
"Wonderful," Wilson said sarcastically. "I'm a goddamn medical slave. Thanks for nothing."
"You think I like it?" Jacob asked, suddenly on the defensive. "What I do? What we're doing here?" he gestured loosely towards the lab. "I don't. I'm not a religious man, Wilson, so I don't want to say we're playing God. But we are. The rules around here… they change us. And not for the better. Some of the things I've had to do to get all that equipment for you…" He paused, searching for the words to continue. "Mostly it's just shipping and handling, but sometimes the stuff you ask for is proprietary, or not available. And I gotto be persuasive." Wilson had to admit that Jacob looked like he could be a very persuasive man if he wanted, but at the moment he just looked disgusted with himself. "I don't like it," Jacob continued, "but I believe it's for the greater good. So long as I believe that, I'm following my orders. And that means you're staying on the station until the project's done. Case closed."
Wilson scoffed. "Get off your soap box, Jacob. You really think this is about the greater good? This is about God not being cool enough to make people live forever, and us having to pick up the slack. This is about doing what has never been done before." Jacob just frowned.
"Lots of things are never done, and there's a reason," Jacob insisted, crossing his arms across his barrel chest. "We aren't doing this to prove anything," he insisted, "we're doing it because it's in humanity's best interests. It's the right thing to do."
"We're doing it because we can," Wilson protested. "We're doing it because it's amazing. How can that not move you? We are part of the greatest medical endeavor in mankind's history, Jacob! We are bringing a dead man back to life!"
"Do you even know who he was?" Jacob asked seriously. "Do you even know why they've given you all the money to bring this man back?"
Wilson waved his hand dismissively. "He's Shepard. Some kind of Alliance hero. I don't know the specifics. He's dead right now but soon he won't be. Good enough."
"Do you even know his first name?"
"No, and I don't care. I know he's one hundred-eighty-one centimeters tall. I know he weighed a hundred-ten kilos when he died. I know he has O-neg blood type. I know he has a family history of arthritis and some minor dementia on his mother's side. Hand me a barrel full of spleens and I could probably pick his out through smell alone. I know everything there is to know about Shepard, believe me." Jacob just shook his head, unconvinced.
"If you did, you'd know Commander John Shepard was a person, and that he's important. He isn't a pile of numbers and measurements. When you're done, he's going to be alive again, and he's going to go back to bat for us all. That is why we're here."
The two men fell silent as they heard Miranda's voice call for Wilson over the intercom. She sounded angry. As usual.
Wilson stood up. "Alright, Jacob. That can be why you're here. But I'm here because I want to be." It was true, Wilson realized. As bitchy as Miranda was, as emasculated as he made him feel on a regular basis, he wanted to be here. It really was beautiful, what they were doing. Jacob nodded his reluctant acceptance as Wilson picked up his tray and walked away, spirits lighter than they'd been in weeks.
"Hey Wilson?" Jacob called out as he was leaving the cafeteria. He stopped and turned. "If you want a message delivered to somebody offworld or something, I'd be happy to do it next time I leave the station." He smiled genuinely.
"Nah, forget it," Wilson said, waving an arm. "I gotto get back to work."
598 days, 6 hours after subject brain death
–
Wilson had hoped, in the weeks and months leading up to it, that the day they finally turned Shepard back on would mark the beginning of the end, would mark a relaxation in their feverish laboring and in Miranda's omnipresent anger. They'd spent eighteen months with Shepard frozen and very much dead while they worked feverishly to put him back together. Organ systems would be injected with activators and allowed to thaw and operate only periodically, for specific purposes, and once they were in order they'd usually be carefully shut down again, just to be safe. Shepard was dead, and as long as he was dead, he wasn't getting any worse.
Still, eventually they had to let things take care of themselves. Tissue grafts, organ transplants, cybernetics, all had made great strides in the past century, but when it came to the beautifully complicated fine-tuning that went into a homeostatic organism, no doctor even came close to the body's own natural healing mechanisms. There were limits to what the Cerberus doctors could notice and fix on their own.
Tens of thousands of man hours had already gone into Shepard when the day came to put the first sparks of life back into the late Commander. Miranda had run them through dozens of practice runs on cadavers and computer models and animals, hell-bent on making sure every detail was right. Each system had to be brought back properly synchronized with the others. Blood contents had to be stringently adjusted, eased back to their regular concentrations, not just flooded back all at once. Stress hormones had to be managed. More pedestrian medical precautions that their patient's uncommon condition had allowed them to ignore up to that point had to be reinstated. It was miserable, complicated work, compounded by Miranda's fiery temper, and yet the staff had been excited. It was their first milestone – where before they had been working on a corpse, soon they would be working on a man.
It had gone well. Each doctor had performed his job perfectly, and Shepard's systems went online without a hitch. There were no major hemorrhages or overblown immune reactions, liver enzymes were largely in the normal range, blood flow was as good as could be expected, cybernetics had interfaced properly. Shepard had been a healthy ox of a man in life, and his body showed it, taking to each treatment better than any patient Wilson had ever seen. By the end of the day, while still not 'alive' in the strictest sense, Shepard was running on little more life support than the average coma patient. It was cause to celebrate. They had already done the impossible.
Still, Miranda was unsatisfied. Scans showed the pain centers of Shepard's brain exploding with color, as the thousands of surgeries caught up to the man's reawakened nervous system. It was an inevitable side effect, as far as Wilson was concerned (Conatix had not instilled in him much concern for patients' pain), and yet Miranda had been furious. She blamed the staff, claimed they had been clumsy and damaged Shepard during the reawakening process. She threw an absolute fit, shouting about how the pain might shatter Shepard's mind before it even got on its feet, and despite Wilson's best efforts to reason with her, tossed everyone out of the lab again.
Wilson and the other doctors had taken up post just outside the door with their unopened bottles of champagne, waiting anxiously in case Miranda called for their aid. She never did. The sounds of her working had continued deep into the night.
679 days, 11 hours after patient brain death
–
Miranda let out a sigh. It wasn't a particularly loud sigh – Wilson doubted she even knew she'd done it herself – but the sign of weariness was so out of her character that he couldn't help but look up from his work. She was seated at Shepard's feet, an ignored clipboard in her hand as she stared vacantly at the ECG monitor's rhythmic beeping.
Wilson didn't know what to say. He knew Miranda was arrogant, and if he asked her what was wrong she would be on the defensive in a millisecond. But still – the sight of her distraction was mesmerizing. It was so unusual. It was like the picture of the five-legged fetuses in one of his textbooks back in school, the picture he'd torn out and kept in one of his binders just so he could take it out whenever classes threatened to overwhelm him and revel in the sheer, beautiful strangeness of it. Miranda sighing, like a multi-limbed fetus, just seemed so inherently wrong that his scientist's mind could not let it go. He tried to broach the subject tactfully.
"Shepard's eyes look good," he said. "The corneal grafts have integrated right and he's already showing some pupillary reflex." It was good news – Shepard's nerves were interfacing with his cybernetic implants, a process that often took considerable trial and error even in healthy patients. Shepard's eerie red eyes rolled back and forth frantically in their sockets, very much alive.
"Good," Miranda said, returning to her clipboard. Wilson frowned.
"I can't imagine it'll be too long before we can start some larger scale brain stimulations," he offered hopefully. "This bastard will live yet." Miranda did not look excited at the prospect. She did, however, finally look at him and turn her clipboard so he could see it.
"This morning's scans," she explained dourly. "More noise. AP tracings aren't taking. More lost brain function. We're up to a confirmed 7% loss already."
"So what?" Wilson asked, shrugging. "So he's 93% Shepard. Way I hear it, 93% Shepard is still quite a guy. He could get away with saving 93% of the council – salarians regenerate, don't they?"
"He has to be perfect," she said quietly, more to herself than to Wilson. "That's why we're here. To restore Shepard just the way he was. Anything less is pointless."
Wilson slapped his scalpel down on the tray with enough force to make Miranda look up in surprise. "Am I the only one here who thinks this is cool!?" he shouted, gesturing at Shepard. "Look at him! He's breathing! He's alive! We brought a man back to life! It is NOT pointless! It's amazing! I am just gobsmacked how you all can be so goddamn down about this!" He stared at her, eyes wide. "We did the impossible, Miranda! We're the greatest doctors who ever lived!"
"It isn't a contest, Wilson," Miranda said.
"No, it isn't," Wilson agreed, walking around the table. "Because it's already over. This is the greatest medical achievement in our species' history. It doesn't matter now if Shepard comes out a rage-addled retard. He'll have a few pieces missing but he'll be able to shoot a gun. Fill in that 7% with pro-Cerberus propaganda and your Illusive Man can put him at the head of his army or whatever the hell else he wants him for. Or just shoot him and start over, I don't care. But would it kill you to show a little respect for what we've done here!?"
"Shepard was perfect. He is the only one who can save us. Whatever our personal feelings on the matter, we have been instructed to bring him back, exactly the way he was," Miranda said, still in the tone of voice that suggested she was arguing with herself more than Wilson. Wilson's brow raised as an idea occurred.
"You're not worried about meeting him, are you?" he asked. "Worried he'll take your job? Worried that he'll reject you and Cerberus and all this crap to go do something better?" Miranda stared pointedly at him, eyes suddenly filled with fire.
"No!" she protested angrily. Wilson grinned as realization dawned. He remembered what Jacob had told him, about how Miranda had been engineered – the perfect woman, to use Jacob's (admittedly biased) words.
"You're worried he's better than you," he accused, not quite keeping the smile off his face. It was just so delicious seeing Miranda getting a taste of her own medicine, finding out how she made the people around her feel every day. "You don't want to see him wake up and prove he's worth more than you are."
"He is worth more," Miranda said coldly. "My engineering cost seven point four million credits. Almost two million more went into my education. The Lazarus project is now over four billion credits, and still counting." She stared at Shepard's unconscious form, face a practiced, neutral mask. "He is better than me, Operative Wilson," she said quietly. "Otherwise we would not be here. Now if you will leave me, I have work to do."
Wilson walked out of the lab, more or less content for once.
700 days, 7 hours after subject brain death
–
The crack of Jacob's gun echoed off of the station's steel walls like thunder. Each shot was measured, precise. He used his whole body to aim, allowing his bullet's path to flow from his back, down his arms, into the pistol, and finally true center on his target. Every few shots he would calmly eject a heat sink and replace it in the blink of an eye, his aim never wavering. He did not bother to look up when the door opened and Wilson entered the firing range.
"Miranda kick you out again, huh?" he asked. Wilson sighed, rubbing his forehead in his trademarked gesture of frustration.
"Same old same old," he confirmed. "She had to leave the station and she doesn't trust anyone to be in lab without her anymore. Not that it matters – I haven't been allowed in there for a week now. Said I was screwing up the AP synchronies. Wouldn't even tell me how I was screwing up. Not sure what she was talking about."
"She's a genius," Jacob said simply, taking aim again. "I gave up knowing what she's talking about a long time ago." He fired five times in rapid succession, neatly striking his target each time. Grinning in satisfaction, he turned to Wilson and held out the pistol. "Wanna try?" he asked, "always helps me work off extra stress." Wilson shrugged and grabbed the pistol.
"Must work wonders," he said, taking aim on the target and doing his best to mimic Jacob's posture. "I don't think I've ever seen you stressed."
"Shoulda seen me this morning," Jacob replied, leaning against the wall. "Spent the last two weeks getting the mechs unboxed and set up. Setting up the security protocols on those LOKI's is a bitch. Only just finished an hour ago, until someone finds another problem." Wilson squinted, took aim, and fired. The shot went wild, cleanly missing the target. He swore under his breath.
"What are the mechs for? We expecting an attack?"
"Extra security," Jacob said. "Miranda's orders. Keep your eyes open and your chin up. Off hand more forward, use that to steady your aim, main hand is there to absorb the recoil. Elbow extended but loose."
"Miranda's getting goddamn paranoid," Wilson grunted, adjusting his posture. He fired again. This shot was closer, and winged the edge of the target.
"Project's almost done," Jacob said with a shrug. "She says she's worried someone might sell us out now that Shepard's almost awake and they know the whole thing wasn't just a pipe dream. Maybe try to kill Shepard or sell him off. Traitors." Wilson's eyes widened and he lowered his aim, turning to stare at the chief of security.
"Who would do that? Who would betray all this work?" he demanded, a terrible thought entering his mind. Miranda had been treating him even worse than usual lately, pushing him farther and farther away from the project. Throwing him out on a whim. What if she thought…?
"Lots of possibilities," Jacob said. "Disgruntled employees, industrial spies. Not to mention all the enemies Shepard made that won't be keen on seeing him back. Miranda's got me investigating a half dozen suspects."
"Who?"
"You know I can't tell you that, Wilson," Jacob said, betraying nothing with his eyes. He pointed to the target "Try again. Keep your arms straighter this time." Wilson nodded dumbly and turned back. He squeezed the trigger rapidly, listening with no satisfaction at the sound of them striking his target. Jacob grinned and clapped him on the back. "Not dead on, but not bad, not bad! You're a quick study."
"Thanks," Wilson mumbled. Jacob must have caught the haunted look in his eyes, for his smile disappeared. It didn't take him long to guess what was bothering the doctor.
"Listen, Wilson. I know Miranda's a hard woman to work for. Believe me I know. But you need to give her some credit. She is not going to kill you as soon as the project is over."
Wilson swallowed dryly. He did know a great many sensitive details about Shepard's resurrection. What if Miranda and the Illusive Man wiped the station and all its staff out, just to cover their tracks? It was a terrible possibility – but did he really think Miranda was that heartless? The answer stared him in the face. Yes. Yes he did.
Wilson handed Jacob his pistol, deep in thought, and headed for the door.
"Where are you off to?" Jacob asked, already taking aim at the target again.
"I'm… not sure."
The Illusive Man took another slow draw from his cigarette. His star, his perfect symbol of the frailty of the galaxy, was putting on a show today. Elegant solar flares breached from the churning ocean of fire that was its surface, changing colors as they arced and finally died out. The star's death throes were beautiful. Behind him, the interlaced hologram of Miranda cleared her throat. The Illusive Man deliberately took his time in responding – he knew Miranda was a headstrong woman, a leader and a genius, and it was important he remind her of his place or he risked losing his. He gave her a lot of freedom, but for him, she would just have to wait.
"Is it done?" he asked at length, not turning.
"Yes," she confirmed. "All sensitive materials have been moved to secure locations. Off of the grid."
"All of Dr. Wilson's notes? Medical scans and equipment reports?"
"All of it."
"And your PIT scanner?"
"It has been delivered, as you ordered. All records of its operation and existence have been destroyed."
Another draw on his cigarette. The Illusive Man smiled. Miranda had truly outdone herself this time. Developed a keystone technology for revival after brain death. In time he would let one of his front companies 'invent' the PIT scanner and sell it to fund his other projects, but for now… he could think of other individuals worth their own Lazarus projects. Himself, for one. He would keep the secrets in hand for now.
"Are you ready for what comes next?" he asked. It was time to make their move. The Collectors had struck again – Freedom's Progress, their largest target yet – and humanity could wait no longer. They needed Shepard.
There was a long pause.
"I am."
"Do it."
–
Codex entry: The Lazarus Project (final statistics)
Patient: Cmndr John Shepard
Species: Homo sapiens sapiens
Sex: M
Birthday: 4.11.2154
Weight (alive): ~110kg
Height (alive): ~1.81m
Date of Death: 10.21.2183 (age 29)
Project dates: 10.27.2183 – 11.15.2185 (749 days)
Project director: Miranda Lawson
Project chief medical officer: Eric Wilson
Total primary staff: 85 (43 medical, 21 engineering, 4 psychology, 8 pharma-chemical, 9 administrative)
Approximate budget breakdown
Facilities/Equipment - $1,905,643,900
Research and Development – $1,712,000,000
Cybernetics – $367,000,000
Chemicals/Supplies – $167,967,000
Labor – $30,500,000
Total: $4,183,111,000
Treatment summary:
CLONAL TISSUE – approx 45%, including spinal cord, hippocampus, peripheral cerebral tissue, kidneys, digestive system, exterior eye tissue, pericardium, left lung, inner ear, nasal passages, testicles, extensive skin grafts. Tissues grown clonally via SNCT procedure to ensure immunocompatibility. Digestive system, kidneys, lung, and eye tissue grown exterior to patient – all other clonal tissue developed in situ.
ENGINEERED OR NONCLONAL TRANSPLANT – approx 8%, including thymus and bone marrow transplants and neural arc regeneration. Cells isolated from subject and engineered prior to reimplantation. Antigenic bath restored immunological function after irradiation.
TRANSIENT CYBERNETICS (MEDIGELS) – approx 4%, including nutrient bathing critical organs. Urological analysis confirms all transient cybernetics treatments fully cleared.
PERMANENT CYBERNETICS – approx 21%, including eyes, skeletal joints, bone repair, trachea, nervous summation computers in optic chiasma and foramen magnum, radio-cushioned short-wave antenna in optic chiasma. Grafttec-treated alloys glow red to indicate proper tissue adhesion. Glow expected to disappear within 6-8 weeks of adhesion.
CONVENTIONAL SURGERY – approx 22%, including right lung, liver, ventricles and aorta, skin, tongue, bladder, pancreas, most skeletal muscles. Conventional physical therapy expected to speed convalescence.
Subject legally dead for 598 days before rudimentary brain activity restored. Additional 103 days before lower cognition and consciousness tests began. Initial test led to stress-related shutdown. Patient sedated and hemorrhage repaired. Subsequent tests on days 720, 728, 729, 730, 734, 735, 739, 740, 741, 742, 744, 745, 746, 747 performed in semi-conscious state.
SUBJECT AWOKEN PREMATURELY ON DAY 749
WARNING: Following 147 tests incomplete:
Kinesthetic battery (inc. coordination, muscle strength, endurance, hypertrophy analysis, steroid regimen adjustments)
Final sensory battery (inc. optical, audial, olfactory, gustatory, peripheral hot/cold/pressure, peripheral pain, advanced reflex arcs, gravitometric sense)
Higher cognition battery (inc. long term memory, short term memory, memory formation, muscle memory, pattern recognition, problem solving)
Ancillary tests of health (inc. immunological battery, long term cellular ecology, cancer screen, biofilm screen, sexual function/fertility)
RECOMMEND COMPLETION OF MISSING TEST(S)
RECOMMEND COMPLETION OF MISSING TEST(S)
RECOMMEND COMPLETION OF MISSING TEST(S)
RECOMMEND COMPLETION OF MISSING TEST(S)
–
A/N: So, chapter 2. I did say I was going to focus on lesser characters, didn't I? I know people aren't going to like Wilson as much as, say, Tali, but I thought the game was so ambiguous about who Wilson was and why he did what he did. I wanted to explore who he was (plus, it gave me the opportunity to speculate on just how you might bring someone back from the dead).
On Wilson's betrayal: The game is so unclear, and I tried to maintain some of this ambiguity. Perhaps he betrayed Cerberus out of fear for his own life. That said, I personally prefer the idea that Wilson was framed by Miranda/TIM. Not that I necessarily want to portray Wilson as a good guy, but I think it makes Miranda more interesting (something which I'd argue her character desperately needs). My impression of Miranda will be more openly evil and at odds with Shepard than she's portrayed in the game.
I'm already almost done chapter four, and starting on five. So expect chapter three before too much longer. It will be all about the secret life of Crewman Hawthorne.
I'm kidding. It will be about major characters.
(or will it?)