LOCATION UNKNOWN

SYSTEM UNKNOWN

DATE UNKNOWN

"I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name."

HIS LAUGHTER HAD DIED AWAY.

Only a vague sense of immense grief and longing remained, regret for knowledge he would never and could never know, the despair of knowing it was just… over there, eternally beyond his reach.

Something else felt odd in him - he felt as if he no longer had the capacity to lie. There was simply no longer any point to the practice. No longer lie. Not to himself, not to anyone else. It just seemed… futile.

There was a crackling sound from behind him, a ripping-zipping noise that set his teeth on edge. The floor grew a shape and released it. A human female – or an incredible copy of one – took one step and looked up at him with eyes that were black pits that seemed to go deeper than her skull would allow. She, like him, was as naked as a newborn, but of a physical perfection not even literature could describe, nor any fantasies beyond fantastic. This woman was human, female - in the exalted sense, perfected past any human idea of perfection. Shepard's instant erection might have embarrassed him if he'd been anywhere else, but it was a perfectly understandable reaction, made long before his mind had even been aware of the blood moving within him. Even as he watched "she" 'devolved', leaving impossible perfection behind for common humanity, and Shepard stopped reacting and finally started thinking again. With bowed head, she was suddenly wearing clothes, a dark uniform - and he'd not seen them form on her and he'd not taken his eyes off her the whole time. It was only when he moved that he realized that he too had been clad, dressed in his old N7 leathers from graduation.

When she looked up with straw-blonde hair hanging over violet eyes and those high cheekbones, Shepard started, for he recognized her.

"Mulholland?!" She smiled at him, that old grin that simultaneously mocked him and seemed to promise him… other things. He'd never had the guts to try, had always half-regretted it.

"Fuck, Shepard, you look like shit that's been shat from something really ugly, beaten, eaten and then shat again."

"You're dead." The stupidly-obvious out of his mouth before he could stop himself. She walked up to him, stopped, cocked her head at him, then tapped him squarely between the eyes. The finger felt human, her breath and smell of her skin.

"I'm as alive as you are. So's my memory in you. Here, there's no difference between the memory and the reality – well, as close to the conception of reality of which you're capable."

"Who – what - are you – really?"

"'Really'? That's tricky. At best - an amalgam ...I think." She pointed to the colossal being suspended above them. "Yesterday, I was myself, with an image of myself in my own mind that I knew to be me, with my own memories and my own ambitions. Today, I'm the same, but full of a past I don't recognize, but know is mine. I am that me and I am this me, and for some reason I doubt I'll ever understand, they are both correct. Does that make sense?"

"About as much as you ever made." He said it with a smile, couldn't help it. If she were an illusion, she was a welcome one. There were few people – dead or alive – that he'd trusted more than she.

She smiled back.

"Fair enough. As to why, I'm… necessary. I'm a thing to facilitate interaction that leaves you sane. There is no reason to me personally being here, other than the obvious, I was simply plucked randomly. I'm just one you trusted, a voice you found credible."

She frowned.

"As to just who brought me and you… all I know is… " she pointed again to the immense being above them, seemed to fade out slightly, speaking as if the words were being dropped into her head for her to repeat. "…that that is an utter inconsequentiality to and of its creators, but even as such, its simplest thought would crush you and I into our component atoms and beyond, and this interaction is but a molecule swirling around a molecule, so insignificant a task it is for its full awareness. We're simply too limited to understand it fully, and that's not an insult. Just a fact."

Shepard nodded. Of course it was. Facts and their reality, well, they've always been flexible, depending on where one stood.

"Exactly this," she nodded. "A man at the bottom of a chasm sees it as all there is, wonders at the sky above. A man on the rim of that chasm sees the larger world around it. How does the man above explain that greater reality to one who has lived forever between those walls in those shadows? And if one lives in orbit above that sky? How is it explained then?"

She swept an arm across the vast space around them.

"You see this, but this isn't actually here – there's no reality to it you can comprehend, but it is real. It is not an I, nor is it there or here. Only you and I are here."

"Look, I could ask all the usual stupid questions and rattle out the dumb clichés, but could you just…"

"I don't have an explanation our minds would accept. To describe this thing we experience now negates that experience. To uncover for you the fundamental basis of reality would negate our reality. If you do not uncover the process of discovery for yourself, you cannot understand. Reality does not tolerate the ignorant."

"That almost makes actual sense."

"Of course, even if we could understand the reality of where we are – if we can be considered to be anywhere at all – we would be changed so utterly by that understanding that it would be as if we never were – all we are as we are now would be undone. We would be… else. But we would have no way to know if what we think we understand is actually factual, without a point of reference, of which we would have none, nor can possess. It would be if I described a meal you've never heard of, made of ingredients you've never tasted, or ever will."

"The more I understand, the less I know. You can tell me, but it'd be pointless. I figured that was the way it was heading, so it's not really much of a revelation."

"It is one that has killed uncounted multitudes. The revelation is that it's one of only the very few facts our kind are truly capable of understanding, yet to it, we are blind as if we'd never known sight."

Shepard shook his head. It was past odd to hear Mulholland talk this way. She had never been much of a philosopher. She'd been an extraordinary woman, one who enjoyed being a woman to the utmost extent of her being – probably why she'd attracted him so, and scared the crap out of him – but she'd never needed any 'deep' explanations for life or her place in the universe.

"I'm here," this copy(?) of the long-dead woman said, reading his mind, saying that which the Mulholland he remembered had once told him in a rare moment of introspection, "I'm alive, every emotion I have I'm happy to have, every feeling my body feels reinforces its own reality. I'm glad to be. That's enough."

"That was my Amy, all right." He shook his head. It was too easy to lose himself in the memories.

"Your Amy?" She sent him a look of incredulity – with a smile.

"Well," he replied, stumbling a bit. "Mine in the sense that you're not the one I knew personally. Yeah?"

She nodded with a slight scoff and a 'humpf'.

"I have everything she knew and your memories of her too, Shepard."

"You can't condemn a man for thoughts he never acted on."

She laughed.

"Relax." She sent him an impish smile. "You should have acted on a least one or two. She wouldn't have minded at all."

"Now you tell me." He laughed with her, and for a moment it felt like the past, but that was not a place Shepard visited very often.

"So – why am I here at all, then?"

"You were noticed, I guess is the best way to describe it. You're a …fulcrum. A locus of events. A relative rarity. Such a rarity one of the Lesser determined you were worth saving. You ended the '...'."

Shepard winced. It was the first time words ever hurt. No, not the words, the concept contained in the words. There was so much information meant to be imparted in it that his brain simply couldn't process it. Amy wove in and out of herself and her 'message' as it were as she spoke.

"Sorry, I didn't get that last bit."

"The concept is… beyond us. Let me see… you ended the Fractured Harvest."

"I stopped the Reapers?" A nod.

"It hadn't been Planned, but it had been interesting enough to allow. The culls of the Machine cycles created their own evolutionary dynamics. Much was Recycled, so little of value had been lost."

"They're talking about the lives of trillions, as if they were nothing but…"

"Our conception of life. Don't presume we have the sole definition – or the correct one."

"Murder is murder," he muttered.

"Murder is a legalistic and morally artificial term." She told him, those 'other' words taking over. "All these terms are meaningless, these limits you place on your own perceptions facile and inherited. You have been taught poorly, of what came before and not what is coming. You crawl instead of fly. Yet, even these judgments are meaningless. Evolution has no plan, no ethical artifice, no empty morals, it does not murder, it simply is. Life creates it. Only life matters. Death and birth are the progenitors of the other. Life is simply the process by which evolution proceeds. It is neither conscious nor a living process in itself, it is merely change both subtle and broad. It is not a belief system nor philosophy, it is not knowledge nor instinct. It can be shaped, it can be given direction, but it cannot be stopped, it cannot be wished away, it cannot be denied. Even as it is controlled, it influences. Even those who created me and you and that above us and all you know are not its ultimate master, for it shapes even them."

"They still sound like gods."

Mulholland scoffed. She seemed to be getting better control over herself.

"There are no gods. Gods are self-imposed limits on the universe which do nothing but stifle an organism's evolution. There is only thought and perception, curiosity and experience, and the uncertainty that these conceptions have ever existed at all. There is no reality, only certainty in the conception of the idea of the suspicion that reality may possibly contain within itself the probability that it may actually exist."

"So, they have no idea who or what created them, either?" She smiled.

"What directs me has never seen them, they exist beyond mundane perception, beyond possibly even their own perceptions of themselves. No, whomever brought me here don't know who or what they are, the merest sliver of an idle thought from one would crush the collective brains of entire civilizations; they only know they exist. Perhaps they were the very first evolved consciousness, billions of years old, thus impossible to know. Yet, they exist, they are in and part of the universe. The place you call home, your galaxy, they forged as a crucible for study - the Receptacle, names given only for reference for those few who discover them – and you are products of their experiments in evolution. All I can say is that, as they are, they too are merely outcomes of evolution, yet they know its mysteries, they manipulate its forces, they give it new directions. You can only see their shadows, can only feel the barest ebb of their passing. You will never know them, for by the time you can know them, they will yet be so far past you their mystery will not change. Perhaps they are merely primal forces, perhaps they are the masters of such, perhaps they are both. You felt what happened when you entered into the presence of one of their most insignificant servants - that above us. What you experienced earlier was only its' most base perception of you – simply being noticed almost destroyed you."

"Yeah – I had that inkling. About that sanity thing…" From nowhere the memory punched him hard in the arm.

"You asked, jackass."

"Fine." He rubbed his arm. He wasn't sure if all of this was simply his mind descending into madness and creating 'explanations' to spare itself, or the last fading, twisted memories of dying synapses. Either way…

"I appreciate what clarity to that there was. Having been 'noticed' I'm to do what, exactly?

"You are to be …preserved."

"Excuse me?"

"From the Selection." The huge space before them suddenly showed the entirety of the Milkiway. "The Pathosis had been unleashed, the Resumption has begun."

"'Resumption'? 'Pathosis'? Why do I like neither of those words?"

"Your instincts knows of their inevitability. All serve the Paradigm. They were allowed to be interrupted by the Fractured Harvest, but now the Progression resumes. The Pathosis is the agent of the Resumption. The Selected have been done so and will be observed, the rest Culled or Revised. Such has been the purpose of your Receptacle."

"They're going to continue what the Leviathans started?!"

"No. The creatures you call Leviathans started nothing. Their Reapers and their Harvest were a grossly-flawed imitation of the Paradigm. Inefficient and wasteful. The Pathosis is inevitable. Unlike the Reapers, it will not be stopped once unleashed."

Mulholland paused. She – or whatever it was that had been feeding her the information - seemed to hesitate, then decide.

"If not for the Pathosis, you would not have halted the Harvest."

Shepard blinked.

"What?"