LOCATION UNKNOWN
SYSTEM UNKNOWN
DATE UNKNOWN
"I could tell I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up."
EVERYTHING HURT.
It was if every cell in his body had been squeezed very hard, then individually extracted and squeezed a second time before being put back upside down. It was also hard to remember how his senses worked. He could taste passing well, his mouth filled with the flavor of burnt metal and sour ice. After a moment, he realized the reason he could smell nothing was that there was nothing to smell. Breathing in, the air was fine, yet completely odourless – or anything that did smell in it was below or above his sensory perception.
Otherwise… nothing.
Ears told him everything was silent. A very odd kind of silence, a silence that contained no sound. Usually, no matter where one went – without the intervention of noise-deadening tech, there was always some ambient sound. Even if it was just slight eddies in the atmosphere surrounding one, that dim "ear-to-the-seashell" sound. Like the smell, it was just nothing. No sound of moving air, no distant power generation, no dripping, no mutters or murmurs, no machinery. Nothing. The air around him was neither cold nor warm, just there.
Right. Eyes next. They opened properly, stung a bit, saw only black and white initially then images gradually regained their colour – such as it was. Feeling that most of his senses were operating within tolerances, Victor Shepard slowly climbed to his feet, tried to take a survey of just where he was.
His first impression was …featureless.
Great walls of grey something – he couldn't tell if they were rock or metal or some odd amalgam of both. A close look at the floor revealed extremely fine marks, some amazingly precise machining, intricate designs in no sensible pattern he recognized. Grey light showed him that the walls abutted twisted put precise walkways, honeycombed above and below him, but he could see no ceiling, the walls just disappearing into a haze, and they created equally deep chasms to the sides.
It struck him that he'd once heard Hell described like this.
He tried his voice, used the standard "Hello", before he called for Jack or Grunt, not anxious or perturbed just yet, his mind too busy assessing and calculating. The sound of his voice carried with such clarity it startled him, but it seemed to not carry too far before it faded into that absolute silence, as if it didn't quite know what to do with itself once said. He picked a direction, figuring one was a good as any, and started walking, stopped, then resumed. Again, such strangeness, as the air seemed to have to remember to part as he moved through it, as if it had been still for a very, very long time.
He was, it took him a moment to realize, naked.
Right. Of course I am. I'm hoping that this just means… hell, no – it probably means I'm dead. Getting to be a habit.
He turned a corner to find the same precise walkway leading into the distance. There wasn't a single primary colour anywhere he could see.
If this is hell, though… well, frankly, it's kind of dull.
Shepard remembered, far back before the batarians arrived on Mindoir, his mother reading him the myths of past cultures. His parents had been Saganists, and not remotely religious, preferring to see the universe as a place of ultimately understandable scientific wonders, instead of a grim star-lit midway point between some dull heaven and an unjust hell.
His best friend at the time, Eddie Carpolli, came from a family of Unitangentists, who believed that there was a God, but that God expected you to take his marvelous universe and the amazing brain he gave you to basically go figure stuff out. When one died, God asked only one question: "What did you learn?"
Fortunately, there was no wrong answer, which Eddie used to describe as the "beauty of" that particular religion. There was no hell in Eddie's belief system, just an endless cycle of being sent back until you learned everything that could be understood, although God did keep a mystery or two for Itself. When everyone finally did it, God would restart the universe and the whole thing would begin again with an entirely new universe of things to learn.
Shepard agreed he could understand its appeal.
There were hells in other religions, of course. Dark ones, cold ones, places of unimaginable burning horrors and tortures (the gods were always described as "utterly compassionate and infinitely loving", and even Shepard's fifteen-year-old mind saw the immense contradiction in a god being that and owning a hell of eternal agony), and the one that always stuck in his head:
The Empty One. An eternity of complete and absolute nothing.
That was the one that bothered him the most. That was the hell he found most terrible as a boy.
And, at the moment, it looked like that was the one he was in.
He shook that off. He'd long ago given up notions of actual hells. There were far too many far too real ones out there, happening every day.
Shepard lost track of time as he walked, uncertain he was actually getting anywhere at all, his mind turning back to Jack and Grunt, the last moments on the Emerald Dawn. He and Jack had been asleep, the Dawn had slewed as if tail-slapped and the ship's alarms had gone off, he'd heard Grunt roar and Jack coming awake with a flare of bright blue… then this.
Shepard didn't hope either Jack or Grunt were all right. Although he had a great affection for Grunt and loved Jack in every way he had, his mind simply didn't work that way. He knew their capabilities. He knew their strengths, mettle and minds. He didn't hope. He succeeded or he failed. If they were dead, they were dead and beyond caring, and he would regret one and mourn the other. If they were alive, he knew they could handle themselves. Until he knew more of both his place and situation, he had no energy to waste on worry.
The new sound was the first thing he noticed, so out of place – even his bare footfalls were almost imperceptible. The sound was… hard to describe. This sound had weight, volume not in intensity but in size, it had an actual physical presence he could feel approaching. His ears heard it as one uniform tone, almost a musical note, but not one his brain recognized. When the sound reached him, he was forced back a step, and it went over him, and around him, and he felt it as if he were wrapped in silk only gods wore, spun from some impossible thread, only to have it go through him so thoroughly he half-turned expecting to see some perfect image of him carried away with it as it passed.
ANd sO
…he thought it said.
Shepard managed one step and collapsed in a surprised heap, gasping for air. A moment later, he could breathe, felt strength return. Beneath him, those intricate designs began to light up, the colour one his brain could not process. He only knew it was a colour, and his mind told him it was a kind of light, but his eyes only skittered over it, unable to look directly. The walls ahead were also glowing. Shepard climbed to his feet, slowly resumed his trek. Ahead, a dark line began at the floor and began to climb, and it took him a moment to realize that line was only the darkness of something beyond a wall splitting apart.
Having little choice, Shepard simply kept walking.
Again, time seemed to elude him, his mind wandering away. He inexplicably found it fixated on the hollow in Jack's hip just under her iliac crest, how smooth the skin was, how warm (biotics were always warmer) and sweet it was; thinking how desolate and broken he'd felt before his resurrection, how very tired he'd been, how her face looked when he'd first seen her up close on Purgatory. He heard his mother screaming. He heard his father yell. He smelled his sister cook, and she made not a sound, better and braver and more human that he'd ever be, his comrades of the finest kind, buried under a million tons of earth and fire - Jack threatening to haunt him if he got her killed, wanting to murder whole worlds for every hurt she'd endured, every tear she'd shed, every outrage they had dared visit upon her - watching that splendidly horrific mushroom cloud rise on Virmire and vapourize one of the bravest, best women he'd ever had the privilege of knowing, sitting next to Anderson and feeling that feeling of immense alone as the great man died, his mentor, his compass, his spiritual father; feeling whole civilizations being smashed and eaten, trillions screaming horror and defiance in his head - he was drowning in an immense Galaxy-ocean of blood, a billion years of abyssal grief and crushing horror and empty murder and depthless pain that screamed across the universe to fall on the ears of deaf gods and all of it the product of the fucking machines of a murderously arrogant race of "master" squid bastards that deserved only extermination, and ifhehadtokilleverygodincreat ionwithhisbarehandstodoit, then…!
CEaSE
That word. He felt it. Smelled it. Saw it writ by the finger of God a billion miles high. Tasted it in the air.
It stopped him, stopped the uncontrollable mass of memories and emotions and primal hates and lusts that howled through his species' cells from the very first predatory eyeshine in the first cave, the first scream of fear, the first roar of grief and vengeance that created weapons and love, that birthed true humanity. That had slammed him down and made him shriek a voiceless roar-wail. Gripping the floor as if he might suddenly be thrown into the air, Shepard bawled and gulped, drooled and sweat, bled and shook.
Eventually, he got control. Such as it was.
Eventually he stood. More or less.
Eventually he saw and heard and felt again without pain. It ached and hurt too deep for any real articulation of pain.
The odd thought occurred to him as he stood there reeling like a drunkard: he could only be destroyed now, he now realized. He could not be controlled by pain, or fear or hate ever again.
Where he was... an oval space immense, vast. He could see, far in the distance, the impression of walls, as if that space was enclosed in a giant grey egg. At its exact center hung an equally enormous figure, the size of a world, a suspended monolithic shape frayed at the edges, both humanoid and not, and it was only afterward he realized that his own perceptions gave it a character, but that form was entirely illusory. This… being, if it was a being, defied his senses. It refused to be quantified. It could have been a billion years old – older, made before Earth had coalesced from dust. Time, though? Time was not something it understood.
Shepard's brain forced it to be comprehensible only to spare what sanity he had left. Merely entering its presence, whatever it was, had released everything in his being, down to his cells, through the cells and genes of his species.
For a moment, he knew it all. Shepard had been Humanity. He had, in that instance, been destroyed utterly and remade utterly and not a single cell in him had actually changed.
YOu ArE
Shepard looked up at what he knew now was only an estimation, a revenant of an idea of a being long since forgotten before it had been designed, before it had been born without being born, when its masters had made all and simply left. The simple act of it merely perceiving his presence had almost destroyed him.
BE KNoWN
WE aRE HAVInG BEEN EVEr
That great silence descended again.
Several eternities went by unnoticed.
This was not Heaven. Nor Hell. That was no god.
But it may as well have been.
Shepard did the only thing he could: he started to laugh, and it felt as if he would never stop.