V: IN-NETWORK

Normandy

It was a palace.

They were in Shepard's private cabin on the topmost deck of the SR-2, the faint smear of starglow wafting through the skylight above. The elevator ride up had been short, but to Tali it had lasted minutes. This was the first time that she had actually ever seen where Shepard had slept and, now that she was here, was starting to understand why he had been so upset upon seeing her quarters on the Rayya.

She guessed that there was about five hundred square feet on this deck. All for one person. Utilitarian, yet extravagant. A queen-sized bed was at the far end of the room, where one had to descend a small staircase to reach. Close to the door was an L-shaped desk. A collection of datapads, books, electronic drives, and framed memorabilia that had been scraped together from his former Alliance days had all been congregated upon the shining surface of the desk. A set of shelves, sandwiched between thick panes of glass, separated the office from the bedroom portion of the deck. Chrome models of starships lay nestled within the shelving (she would have to ask Shepard about those later). And behind the chair in which Shepard now sat was the door to the bathroom which, Tali noted to her chagrin, was so large that it could have easily housed six quarians without complaint.

But that was all small change compared to the one piece of lavishness that adorned the leftmost wall of the deck. An aquarium that spanned nearly the entire length of the room, gurgling a deep and pure blue, bubbled with such a manner of aquatic sea life that Tali had never before seen with her eyes. When she had transpired across it for the first time, she had been mesmerized for a good five minutes, her helmet nearly pressed up against the glass in wonder. The brightness of the creatures in there! The oddity of the translucent ones with the tentacles. How they bustled to and fro in their own little patterns. She could have stared at this aquarium for hours.

She did not have the heart to mention to Shepard just how expensive having an aquarium on a ship actually was. She imagined that Shepard was not looking at the daily cost such a thing was incurring. Quarians would never dream of putting such a thing on their ships, as it took up too much space and required too much energy to maintain. Shepard, to his part, seemed downright embarrassed that his ship came packed with such an amenity. Clearly, its inclusion had not been his idea, so there was no point in Tali castigating the man for this design choice. They could lament about Cerberus' wasteful spending together another time.

The commander was now sitting at his desk, nursing a small glass of whisky, looking at the holo-screen that covered an entire side of the glass shelving. Tali could smell the alcohol through her olfactory filters as her nostrils were slightly burning. Apparently, the implants that Cerberus had used to bring Shepard back had completely overclocked his metabolism. Alcohol had near to no effect on him these days. According to him, he just drank it for the taste and for the memories it brought him. When asked which memories, he had merely given a slight bump of his eyebrows. So, there were some things that he did not share with others.

He finished typing on his keypad and, on the screen, the command console popped up. He pushed back from his desk and appraised her with that solemn look he always wore when he got serious. Never for a second thinking about charging ahead, consequences be damned. "You sure you want to take a look at this?" he asked.

Tali reached into her pocket and withdrew the disc she had taken from the Alarei. The disc that could have exonerated her during her trial, had she chosen to divulge it. Her father's work lay nestled within the folded matrix of silicon and carbon, far away from the prying eyes of the admirals. Worth a fortune, if it fell into the wrong hands.

She handed the disc to the human. "If there is some good to be found on it, I trust you the most with it, Shepard."

Shepard held the disc in his hand for a moment. His expression settled into something that Tali recognized to be deep in thought. It almost seemed as if he was staring out into nothing. Completely blank.

Only a few seconds passed before he snapped out of whatever fugue he had briefly brushed with. He slid the disc into an open port and together they watched the screen as a directory of files popped up.

"Okay," he said. "Where do you want to start?"

Tali crept closer to Shepard's chair and put one hand on the headrest as she leaned in a little bit to see better. "How about the beginning?"

"I won't disagree with you, there."

Using the cursor, Shepard double-clicked on the first file, and sighed as he soon realized that he was looking at several dozen pages of technical jargon. It was a message thread that comprised several communiques regarding signal vulnerabilities in designated geth answering units. Not at all light reading.

He tried scanning the first paragraph as best he could before he settled back into his chair, having given up.

Tali, meanwhile, was fascinated. Even though this was the very work that could have gotten her father's name stricken from the rolls of every ship he had ever served on, the very taboo nature of it gave her reading an edge that she would not normally experience. Hyperactive energy jittered through her as she took control of the screen and scrolled further and further down. As it continued, the thread became an acute summary of what had amounted to several weeks of prep-work by the Alarei prior to their actual experimentation on geth. It involved several manifests of purchases and acquisitions on hardening technology that would bolster the quarian network in case the reactivated geth would try to distribute their runtimes through forceful integration. It also provided comprehensive checklists on the types of experiments that could be run at certain safety thresholds, which included tabled mentions of what power levels the disparate types of geth could reach before they would snap out of low-energy mode and the quarian's automatic shutdown trigger software would be initiated, containing any detected threat throughout the runtime of the experiment.

It was all rather thorough and Tali could have read the entire thing from cover to cover, only she noticed that Shepard's eyes had glazed over and she gave a grin, almost as if she was sorry for the man. He had no background in this sort of thing. It was like he was reading in a completely foreign language that Tali was comparatively fluent in. He was doing his best to make it seem like he was following on, even though the opposite was painfully apparent.

"We can move on," Tali said as she straightened. "You can send me a copy of this after today and I can give you a summary if I find anything interesting."

"Thank you," Shepard said as he closed the window. "You know," his voice took on a mild affect, "I was beginning to understand some of it by the end—"

"Yeah, right," Tali snarked.

Shepard chuckled at the barb. He moved onto the next file and opened it.

The screen flipped to show an image of three geth standing in a triangle formation upon an empty area that had been cleared of crates on the Alarei. Cables snaked from the back of their partially deconstructed heads where several of the armor plates were missing, linking them to the ceiling and a cabling harness overhead. In their hands, they held mock rifles made out of stockfoam and stood in locked combat positions like full-scale toy soldiers while quarian technicians with active omni-tools hesitantly walked around them, never once letting their guard down as though they could spring to life without warning.

Shepard watched the screen for several minutes. He took a gulp of his drink and turned his head over to Tali. "You know what they're doing?" he asked, referring to the quarians.

"They're just positioning the hardware—the physical bodies—in an area with enough space for combat testing. It looks like they've put the actual geth programs in a virtual environment and are simulating various battle tactics. They build a terrain in their engine, configure it to any sort of locale you want—a city, zero-g, a blank white space—and the programs 'fight' in these environments. Well, the physical platforms do nothing, but we are able to digitize their strategies by siphoning their runtimes and placing them in areas that we can control. Imaginary arenas, rather than physical ones."

"That seems…" Shepard tapped a finger upon his chin, "…actually quite conservative."

To the human, it made a certain amount of sense. Trap the geth in a programmed environment so that they could not do any damage in real life. It made so much sense that it belied the evidence he had seen with his own eyes on how Rael and his crew had apparently gotten so greedy for better results that they had been deliberately reactivating the geth, not in these virtual environments, but to function with the environmental limiters removed. To bring them online, all locking mechanisms bypassed.

Tali leaned forward and gave a swipe, trigging the console's haptic detectors. "We can watch what they're doing on the second feed here."

The monitor now showed the graphical representations of the three geth standing upon a beach. The digital environment sloped up towards grassy hills and deep brown stone ruins close to a veneer of trees off in the distance. The sky was an uncanny blue and the ocean had a rainbow shimmer to it. Reminders that this place was not real.

"So this what the geth are supposedly seeing?" Shepard asked.

"To them, this is as real as me talking to you right now. We can override their sensors, implant false data into their processing units. It's like… a hallucination. But for geth."

Shepard partially covered his mouth as he watched the screen in interest. On the virtual beach, the three geth were suddenly and repeatedly exposed to a menagerie of attacks from AI quarian marines, who had popped over a nearby rise without a sound. More like they had spawned there, but this was all for verisimilitude's sake. The marines shot at the geth, who tried to move into defensive formations, but the beach did not have anything they could hide behind. The geth fell, one by one, to the marines' sustained fire, only to reset into the same standing positions and have the whole process pick up all over again.

Not every simulation was carried out in the same manner. Sometimes the geth were armed. Sometimes they weren't. The quarian marines could favor different weapons for each trial—assault rifles, shotguns, grenades—or they could adapt with a mixture. Even the beach changed configurations after several run-throughs—there would be more boulders on the sand, trees separating the marines from the geth, or there would be a weather element involved like rain.

It was like watching an elaborate video game, but there was no one playing it. Shepard and Tali watched the two artificial intelligences spar against one another for twenty minutes. As they went on and restarted, it seemed that the 'game' had been programmed to favor the quarians, for they were winning most of the battles. The geth occasionally eked out a win, but there was no victory to savor for they would soon be blown apart by rocket strikes during the next run or barreled over by tanks as retaliation for their triumphs.

After about the tenth trial had started, Shepard gestured to the screen, not pointing to anything in particular. "And, I'm assuming this carried no risk to the Alarei crew in real life?"

"None whatsoever," Tali affirmed.

If only this way had brought them all the satisfaction they needed, Shepard thought. Maybe her father would still be alive.

"What about the geth?"

"What about them?"

Shepard bit his lip. Tali saw this and felt her heartbeat begin to rise. His posture was stiffening, as though he was treading upon shaky ground.

"Tali," he said lowly, "are the geth feeling this in any way?"

She didn't know what to say at first. Her natural instinct was to squeeze out a lie, or at least deflect the question. Geth did not 'feel' like an organic, after all. They had no true concept of the sensation that made life unique. Therefore, it was impossible to bestow a true value of pain upon them.

He still doesn't understand, she thought with a pang. There were just some things that could not be transferred between species. Shepard just did not possess the inherent distrust of synthetics that she did. She could watch this footage for hours and still not feel even the tiniest hint of remorse. These were cold beings of metal and plastic. Emotionless. More alien than anything she had ever come across before.

What could she do to make Shepard see that?

Taking a deep breath, she chose her next words carefully. "They are experiencing all of this in a manner that is indistinguishable from what you or I know to be 'real.'"

Shepard paused the video and deliberately leaned back in his chair, palms clasped together as he weighed this revelation. Then, he turned in his chair, causing Tali to back up slightly.

"And you don't see any problem with this?"

Okay, so it was clear that Shepard did have an issue with all of this. Still, she was a bit shocked by his tone. It was reminiscent of her tutors scolding her after getting a bad grade in her schooling, or her father levelling a dismissive remark to her during the few times they crossed paths in their room.

"I don't," she said clearly, lifting her chin high. Shepard would not respect someone who lied directly to his face.

The commander spread his hands a couple of inches. "No concerns on morality, here? Or ethics? The geth were feeling this, as you said, every single time they were run through a trial. And how many trials did they go through, Tali? In order to make any machine learning research meaningful, the geth would need to be able to recall the results of all of the trials. Over and over and over again. You don't think that would be a little traumatic?"

Tali felt her cheeks flush. But not from what her deepest emotions had been welling up over the past couple of days. This time, it was of an indignant anger. The same type of rage when she had sworn at Zaal'Koris during her trial.

On top of all this, she didn't even think that this footage was that damning to begin with. Shouldn't Shepard exhibit more concern if quarian lives had been actually put in danger in this clip? She had not yet seen the rest of the disc's contents, but she was confident that she would find more egregious examples of the Alarei crew's recklessness. There would probably be clips of quarians performing live weapons tests on the geth, savagely blowing them apart or setting them on fire just to see what kind of gadgetry was most effective in reducing these things to scrap. Maybe there would even be evidence that the crew engaged in juvenile antics with live geth, like defacing the mobile platforms or simulating vile sexual acts upon them. She had heard the stories around the fleet, stories much worse than what Shepard had just seen today.

She snorted. "You're really going to try and make the geth victims of all this? You think this is actually 'trauma?'"

Shepard shrugged. "Is there any difference to a geth? If you or I were blown up several thousand times in a virtual prison, I'd expect either of us to hold some sort of grudge."

"There are no similarities!" Tali growled. "We don't have the luxury of considering morality when it comes to the geth, Shepard! They took my homeworld! They killed my father! How do you expect—"

She cut herself off as she clenched a fist. Only now did she realize just how loudly she had been speaking. Not entirely speaking, more like yelling. Shepard, to his credit, had taken it all while wearing his attentive expression, as if this very discourse was providing him with some undue fascination.

Tali turned away, embarrassed. She knocked her balled-up fist against the closest pillar. "I'm sorry, Shepard. I… I know you're just trying to understand. But please… please try to see where I'm coming from. You'll never know how I truly feel toward the geth. You just won't. It's like me trying to describe what it's like, being a quarian. There are some things you'll never get."

"That doesn't mean I won't stop trying to learn," he said, his voice soft and comforting. He then reached over and turned the screen off, mad at himself for subjecting the quarian to this so soon after the events of the trial. "That even includes learning what it is like, being a quarian."

A dark laugh came to Tali, almost sarcastic, and she lifted her hands up for a moment. "Why? Why would you even want to know? Why would you even care what goes on behind… this?"

She gestured to her mask, her eyes slit and glaring. The purple fog that permanently locked her away from everyone else. Her safety and her curse. The largest tragic difference between them. She could see him without effort, but he had no idea how to imagine her. She had watched him for so long, envious of his freedom. How could he possibly know her pain?

Shepard stood from his chair. The ship seemed to hum all around him.

"Because, Tali," he said, "you're more than that to me. And it's precisely who is behind that mask," he reached out and gave the purple visor a gentle tap with a finger, "is because I care."

It was as if his eyes could pierce any surface, that they could map the features of her face with such clarity that her head was already bare before him. The thudding in her chest grew painful. Uncertainty and hope, locked in a nebulous battle.

Was this truly idle talk? Or did Shepard truly understand what he was saying? What he was implying? His words seemed too deliberate for there to be any mix-up, yet nothing was definite.

"Shepard—" she whispered, but he shushed her by placing a hand over her vocabulator. The gesture was kind and feather-light. Tali swore that Shepard was imagining doing this as if he was touching her bare cheek, for the tiniest of scrapes—flesh on metal—could be discerned through her helmet, aching in her ears.

"John," he corrected her. "When we're alone, please call me John."

Zurich
University Hospital

"Ms. Zorah, so glad you could come in."

They were in an office that belonged to the doctor that stood behind the singular desk. The large rectangular window shimmered just behind him. Lacquered wood made up the walls, shining with bright white rectangles from the reflected sun that was struggling to peek through the gridded cloud cover that was moving in. Past the glass, a perfect view upon the southern edge of the city and the glistening surface of the Zurichsee. The forested ridges of the valley rolled up in the distance, the first gradient ripples that blocked the view to the powerful Alps beyond.

The doctor was a man with thinning brown hair and scruffy cheeks by the name of Nilsson. He wore wireframe medical specs and a stark white bodysuit.

He stuck out his hand for Tali to shake. She ignored the gesture and instead took the seat opposite the doctor, which was practically a stool with very little lower back support. It was draped in fine brown leather, which the quarian deemed to be quite expensive. Internally, she glowered at the showmanship of wealth. They had the cash to pay for such items, yet they couldn't find a reason to spend it on their patients?

Nilsson, to his credit, smoothly retracted his hand and settled back down in his chair. He had been the doctor assigned to Shepard's care and he had become used to Tali's idiosyncrasies over the course of the past year. People reacted differently to trauma, after all. He had been a witness to a gamut of reactions in his line of work. Some took time to process their grief while others could cast it off immediately. He did not judge her for her behavior, as boorish as it was.

Tali, for her part, had been on edge before she had walked into the office. She had scheduled this appointment a week prior, as was her monthly routine, but had truthfully forgotten about this one until a nurse had come to fetch her while she had been wandering the halls of the hospital. Her skin had been prickling and her mind seemed to be barbed with pins and needles as she had walked from one building to the next, following the charted course to Dr. Nilsson's office, always dreading that she was walking towards a destiny that she would rather not have been foretold.

The doctor smiled sympathetically. "The staff here have told me that you have been continuously attentive at Mr. Shepard's side. Clearly, he's been in good hands this whole time." He waited for a reaction from Tali, but when she did not respond, he continued. "But what of you? You've been coming here—quite reliably—for nearly a year, now. How have you been, Ms. Zorah?"

The quarian was sitting upright, as if she was carved from stone. Her fingers grasped the edges of the chair, her grip crinkling the leather. "Every month we meet, and every month you ask me the same question."

"Should your well-being not be broached at all?" It was a fair question and Tali hated how plain Nilsson's face became upon asking that. "It would be remarkably short-sighted of us if we didn't take into account the well-being of our visitors."

Tali's eyes were like slivers of ice. "My well-being is not the issue here. The man lying unconscious in your hospital is. I need to know, doctor. Has there been any change?"

I'm unimportant in the long run, you bastard. You know what I want. What I need.

Nilsson's eyes briefly glanced down to his table, as though if he were reading off of notes glimpsed only in his bifocals. "If there had been any change, or irregularity we might have observed, Ms. Zorah, you would have been informed well before we met today."

"You've lost hope?" she growled.

"I didn't say that."

"It was the way you said it. As though you don't expect there to be any change."

The gentleness from Nilsson's eyes slowly seeped away. He slowly took off his specs and rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose.

"Try to understand, Ms. Zorah. The breadth of the challenge we are facing here is testing the limits of the staff and the technology at our disposal."

"So send him to a better hospital," Tali rasped.

Nilsson frowned for the first time, the insult cutting deep. Personal insults he could handle. Attacks against his competence were another matter entirely. "It has nothing to do with whatever facility is treating Mr. Shepard. We have secured cooperation from staff and companies from all over the galaxy. A crack team—a very good team—composed of the finest minds from the best medical schools are on the premises 24/7 to attend to my patient's every need. The issue isn't on our end. The injuries that Mr. Shepard has sustained are simply too great for us to overcome for the moment."

"It's just the coma that you need to solve," Tali said dismissively. "You've solved his other injuries, haven't you?"

From the man's reaction, it was as if Nilsson was wrestling with his inclination to fact-check the quarian in a blunt manner, but decorum was consistently pushing him to put up a polite front. To be the stone that refused to yield in the wake of the oncoming wave.

"Yes, but it's because he had other injuries besides his coma is what worries me." Nilsson grabbed at a nearby datapad and cycled through a few tabs before he found the page he wanted. "To bolster my point, I have the initial report from when Mr. Shepard was admitted. He was already in his coma state when he arrived, but the team that recovered him from the Citadel had also observed additional physical injuries."

The quarian made a show of looking away. Her throat was closing up again. "I already know about those. I saw him when he came in. When he was nothing but pulp. Or is that not in your notes?"

"I'm telling you again so that you understand how severe this is. Mr. Shepard was badly burned from being in close proximity to an explosion of some sort—parts of his armor had melted into his skin. On top of that, he was suffering from hypothermia from being exposed to vacuum and he had several gunshot wounds—one to the shoulder and another that damaged his small intestine."

"But you repaired those. Skin grafts took care of his appearance. You surgically fixed everything else."

Nilsson scratched his neck anxiously. "And then there was the whole radiation issue."

Adrenaline hit Tali's bloodstream. She whipped her head back. "What radiation issue?"

"We've never discussed it?" Nilsson momentarily went blank. He reviewed his notes. "No, I suppose it was a benign affliction by the time we started to meet."

"What radiation?!" Tali pressed.

"Acute radiation syndrome," he said to her. "It was unsurprising to the staff, considering the circumstances. Mr. Shepard had been lying out there on the Citadel, with minimal protection to his person, allowing him to become bombarded with a large amount of ionizing radiation. From the notes, he was apparently setting off all of the dosimeters when being subjected to deep tissue scans."

Tali nearly stood and she planted both hands on the edge of the doctor's desk, her fingers ridged like claws. "I was never told that he was radioactive!"

"He's not, don't worry," Nilsson assuaged with a hand. Tali slowly relaxed and let her arms come back, her fingers scraping across the flat wood surface. "His implants allowed him to withstand the brunt of the energy. We treated him immediately with blood transfusions and antimicrobials. He was closely monitored for detrimental symptoms in the days since he was admitted. None were found. And, of course, he has been continuously scanned for the presence of cellular degradation, of which I'm pleased to say there has been minimal. But the reason why I'm telling you all this is because they've all contributed, in some fashion, to the state that Mr. Shepard is in now. Perhaps taken in isolation, each individual injury would not have rendered him unconscious like this. But all at once, their impact has been substantial."

Tali violently shook her head, like she did not want to hear anything the doctor had just said. "I… don't understand," she whispered. "It's just a coma."

"Ms. Zorah," Nilsson folded his hands together, looking like a headmaster about to dispense a punishment upon an unruly student, "a coma is not a thing to take lightly. Some comas can be mild, lasting for only a couple of hours. Some, on the other hand, are so severe that it has taken years for people to get out of them. Decades, even. And sometimes, they don't come out of them at all, but in no way, shape, or form have we even begun to accept that as a possibility for the patient we are referring to."

"But have you tried everything to get him out of it?" Tali was nearly pleading. "I was reading, in this medical journal, something called deep-brain-stimulation—"

"—Which has seen promising results in drawing out patients suffering from comas," Nilsson finished. "I know. I also read the study. But DBS requires additional major surgical procedures in order to enact. Procedures that would only be more detrimental to Mr. Shepard's health. DBS requires placing electrodes directly to the brain so that neurostimulators can trigger specific targets, but from the scans I'm able to see," he pulled up a cross-section of a human nervous system, which looked like a wireframe of a humanoid shape, "Mr. Shepard's cortex area is already congested with implants that have either failed or are barely working as it is. It would be impossible to place the electrodes in a manner that would not interfere with the implants. Additionally, that's not the only thing that could inhibit that kind of procedure."

"I'm guessing you're going to tell me?"

The doctor dipped his head down. When he lifted his head back up, he looked twice as weary as before.

"Mr. Shepard's coma was caused by traumatic brain damage, which is not the most common cause for comas even today. He scored a three on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which is the lowest score possible. Ocular response, oral response, motoric response—we could not get any movement or feedback from any of the tests. Ms. Zorah, these are not good signs that point to any kind of rapid recovery."

"But can he wake?" Tali's vocabulator glowed.

"Ms. Zorah, I'm trying to not give you any kind of false hope. The odds here, frankly, are—"

"Can he?"

Nilsson let the silence act as his answer for a few critical moments. There was a careful calculus in the timing of his responses. A delicate tug and pull. "In theory, he can. But with every passing day, the chance of such a thing happening decreases dramatically. We can provide all the continued care we can to prevent atrophy for if he wakes, but—"

"I know all about the wellbeing treatments," Tali interrupted. "You know I'm by his bedside every single day. I've seen the caretakers move his body to prevent bed sores or other deformities from cropping up. I've watched them electrically stimulate his muscles so that they remain in constant shape and don't wither. I've even been present when they've changed out his bedpans. I've even changed them when the staff wasn't around!"

"Ms. Zorah, I have to advise you to calm—"

Tali brutally slammed her fist down on the desk, making a terrifying crack that reverberated in the room only once. Nilsson was unflappable—he did not even jump from the outburst. But he did shut up, thankfully, as he glanced from Tali's fist to the woman's fierce eyes behind her visor.

"Finish that sentence," Tali hissed.

The doctor made his expression neutral. Respect in the face of such violent grief. He waited until the devastating reverberation in his ears had lessened before finally gesturing for Tali to settle down. "All I'm saying is that we simply don't know what is going to happen. For someone who has been in a coma as long as Mr. Shepard has, recovery will not be easy as simply getting out of bed. There would be many years of physical therapy to undergo and that may not even bring him back to a hundred percent of what he once was. It's most likely that, if he wakes, he will be in a state of confusion and full awareness will take place only after the course of hours, days, or weeks. We cannot say for certain."

"As long as he wakes," Tali said, her voice like a rake over sandstone, "nothing else matters."

She abruptly stood from her chair and looked over Nilsson's head, towards the city. A light rain was tapping on the window now, beading it with droplets. A gray patina was settling over the streets, the greenery deepening in color. The hills beyond were starting to become draped in fog as the clouds rolled over them like languid waves.

"Every night," she said, "there are celebrations all over this world, all over this galaxy, for what he did. So much happiness and revelry, all in his name."

"Ms. Zorah—"

Ignoring the doctor, she continued. "These people… everyone out there… they all owe their lives to him. You. Me. There will be holidays created for him. Museums. Art. One man, beyond all their belief, managed to define a new era as they now know it. For he has become the most influential being who ever lived. Who still lives."

Her hands tightened again and a lump slowly rose to her throat. She could feel her eyes begin to burn, but she blinked the tears away. There was a boiling sensation that was condensing in her head, a mixture of anger and despair. They just didn't understand what he meant to her. And if they did, why couldn't they at least pretend to care as much as she did? The doctors and staff here hid behind their medical opinions and their practiced scripts, trying to bring comfort to those wracked by this fierce pain.

But Tali knew how it could all end. One man just needed to open his eyes.

The quarian turned away from the window, cold eyes finding Nilsson's brown and patient ones. There was a fury crackling away underneath her mask, but even her narrowed eyes and her vibrating body were not enough to intimidate the doctor. Not that that was what she had been trying to do.

After a respectable silence had passed, Nilsson cleared his throat. "If I may make a suggestion, Ms. Zorah, though I can imagine it might not be what you want to hear?"

She returned her gaze to the window again. Studying the ragged undersides of the clouds. Then looked at the doctor, only partially so that he could see just one of her eyes. Whatever.

"Despite the level of care that Mr. Shepard has been receiving, we do need to plan for the worst-case scenario. Now, before he succumbed to his current condition, Mr. Shepard gave you the power of attorney on his behalf. That means you hold the license to carry out decisions regarding his care." He cleared his throat. "Those decisions include any final preparations you might have considered or are considering. Standard procedure, you understand."

Tali was already shaking her head. More vigorous this time, as though such a suggestion could not reach her ears if she was moving her head fast enough. How dare he? How dare he bring such a thing up?

"I have not considered," she squeezed her eyes shut before cracking them open a splinter. "I will not consider. He's going to wake up. I'm telling you that right now. He will wake up."

She turned on a heel and strode to the door, the conversation over in her mind, but not before the doctor got one more thing out.

"Regardless of what happens, Ms. Zorah, there is still one decision the hospital will need from you soon."

Tali stopped and threw out her hands, her back still aimed at Nilsson.

"And what might that be?"

She still did not turn around but could hear shuffling bleeps as Nilsson scrolled through his holo-screen as he was looking for the proper information. "A financial matter. It just so happens to concern Mr. Shepard's coverage. Unfortunately, there will be some changes to his policy that will kick in next month. We will need your signoff to continue the coverage."

"Just let the insurance take care of it," Tali dismissed with a frantic hand gesture. She had never dealt with that kind of paperwork before and did not know exactly what was required of her, anyway.

"That's what I'm trying to say. The insurance for Mr. Shepard will be changing. Quite dramatically, I'm afraid. You see, the insurance provider recently sent out a memo that dictates that they will be reducing their coverage for their policyholders. It's anticipated that out-of-pocket fees will begin charging to Mr. Shepard's account when the changeover happens, while they had been taken care of in totality beforehand."

Tali whirled, eyes uncomprehending. Behind the window, lightning flashed in the clouds overhead. "But he's on the Alliance's health plan."

Nilsson dipped his gaze and idly traced a patten on his inkblack desk. "New policy. New rules. Even at a time like this, these services come at a cost. And apparently, the Alliance has reached their financial limit."

She was steaming. Teeth were chattering in a violent staccato. What the hell was going on? This business with all this insurance crap—this was normal?

"He's being charged for his stay," she stated flatly. "Him. How could you let that happen?"

"Ms. Zorah," the doctor looked up, his voice taking on a pleading tone. Desperation to avoid blame. "This was not the hospital's decision. It was up to the insurance company that owns the commander's policy. If you want to try, you can contact them directly. Plead your case. I'm not saying that will provide significant results, but it may bring some relief."

"I plan to do just that," Tali gritted out, enunciating every syllable so that a ragged growl enflamed the tail end of every word. "So. Which bosh'tet has his policy? Which company do I need to contact?"

Whose skull do I need to bash in?

"One second." Nilsson returned to his console and quickly tapped away at his keyboard. His bifocals reflected the hololight like dual sets of screens right in front of his eyes. He made it to a submenu and quickly scribbled something down on a notepad with a silver fountain pen. He tore the piece of paper off and handed it to Tali.

The quarian took the paper (How old-fashioned) and scanned what Nilsson had written upon it.

"SolBanc," Tali read aloud. "His policy is owned by a bank?"

"It's the norm these days. Diversification into different industries and all that. Several of the largest banks in the galaxy have their own insurance services. SolBanc's just one out of a thousand, in that regard."

Tali slowly crumpled the paper in her hand, imagining that she was holding something quite fragile and precious. If only this doctor had some sentimental knick-knacks lying about. Perhaps she would have availed herself to tossing them against the wall, eager to twist that inflexible face out of proportion, even if it was for a split second.

Her mask holding back an inferno, Tali walked out of the office, this time for good, leaving the very air radiating in her wake.

Ibiza

They sat in one of Haas-Mase's dining rooms in the eastern section of the mansion's second floor. It was rarely used, except for when the resident wanted a little diversity in his setting. A long cherrywood dining table imported from Thessia could seat up to sixteen people. Two chandeliers shaped in ringed systems, very much like how solar bodies acted upon objects, hung over the table. Next to the room, an entire wall was glass, which barred the way to the mansion's ten-thousand-bottle wine cellar.

The bottle that now sat on the table had come from that cellar. Haas-Mase was pouring himself a glass of the burgundy liquid. Out of courtesy, he offered Qual one, despite knowing he could not drink it. Qual had simply held up a hand in refusal, not in the mood for alcohol anyway.

Haas-Mase dispensed with the snobbish formalities that came with wine tasting. Instead of swirling the liquid around in his crystal and breathing in the vapors, he simply went right for the first sip after knocking the cork back into place.

He set the glass down and returned his full attention to Qual. "You can continue. Or should I take a few more swallows in preparation?"

"Depends on how blunt you want me to be," the quarian said.

The human buried his thumb in the side of his cheek as his eyes blackened in thought. "I gave you the instruction to go over the entirety of the firm with a fine-toothed comb. No one else has ever had such access before. I entrusted this task to you because you have an ability that no one in my employ has. You know what that is?"

Qual did, though he pretended not to know. He shrugged.

Haas-Mase raised his glass again. "You have the ability to speak plainly." He took a long draught of the wine. "And the verbosity of others tends to wear on one quite quickly. Your perspective, therefore, is rather refreshing. So, how much?"

The quarian gave a slight tic of his head and blinked his eyes once. The multiple lenses that ringed his visor heavily glared out upon his employer, absorbing everything. "Three hundred billion credits."

The financier leaned back in his chair. He looked like he was in pain. "Jesus Christ."

"Bear in mind, that's the total that I'm up to right now. That amount could very well increase."

Eyes shut, Haas-Mase drained his wine a little more than halfway. "If you would've told me that SolBanc had assets that amounted to that much before today, I probably wouldn't have believed you. You've accounted for our Miami office being destroyed?"

"I have."

"The data centers in our two hub systems? Our campus in Dubai?"

"And the offworld backups of all of SolBanc's internal information, including the licensed darknet satellites." Qual flicked a file from his omni-tool over to Haas-Mase's which beeped once it had received the incoming information packet. A summary of his findings. He never entered a meeting without concrete proof. "Three hundred billion is the amount that SolBanc has lost from its collective destruction."

Haas-Mase knocked back the rest of the wine and stood. Qual watched him pace to the nearby balcony, where he had a good view of the gardeners tending to the lawn and the groundskeepers cleaning the pool among the exhibition of lawn chairs and umbrellas below. The air that wafted into the house smelled of grit and pine.

"The physical sites were insured," Qual said to Haas-Mase's back, "but there won't be any payment. Over 75% of the insurance firms that had stakes on our property folded during the course of the war. The Reapers obliterated them a whole lot more efficiently than they did you, it looks like. Their funds are tied up in legal gridlock and won't be allocated to SolBanc for quite some time, if at all."

Clouds striped the sunset off in the distance and Haas-Mase walked back in. "It would be foolish to assume that we would receive anything substantial to cover the losses. Damn it all—that could have been debt we could have leveraged. And now we're left holding the proverbial empty bag once the dust has settled."

Qual was like a sculpture as only his eyes traced the human while he initiated a circuit around the enormously long dining table. Finally, he stood and began to meet the financier halfway.

"Finding out that information took me only a couple of days to compile," he said. "And Ryke/Saaven has a team going through those very files. They're also going to find out that SolBanc's market cap was grossly overestimated, considering they have access to the same database. When that happens, they'll drop all acquisition proceedings. SolBanc will be that empty bag. You'll be left with nothing."

The human made an impatient gesture. "I know, I know. But at this point, the audit's the thing that's not bothering me the most."

Behind him, Qual was nodding. He had seen the financial reports after all, and knew the danger that awaited.

"The clientele."

"Precisely. Barring the off-chance of a bailout, I'd say there's the utmost certainty SolBanc's more unforgiving clients are going to find out their complete lack of liquidity in short order. It's only a matter of time, at this point. They'll become desperate in that moment, and desperate people are always looking for someone to lash out upon." He gave a furtive glance towards the quarian. "You haven't heard of the Alliance announcing a bailout, have you?"

Qual snorted. "After that memo that went out the other day about the firm altering their policies? If I were the Alliance, SolBanc will be low on my list of companies to rescue. Also, from what money could they possibly have to do a bailout in the first place?"

Haas-Mase conceded that with a nod. It was a long shot anyway—everyone knew that the Alliance was fresh out of cash. Everyone was. In the wake of reconstruction, there had been an unspoken agreement to let a lot of projects and efforts slide on a credit basis. It was rare for cash to change hands these days. Perhaps, sometime in the future, that could become the norm again, but not with all of the electronic data to the bank keys and other assets being lost or otherwise destroyed.

"The bank's going to start getting pressure soon," the human murmured as he clung to a nearby chair. "These people, Qual… they act with even more impunity than we do regarding the law. They won't care for the delicate situation our firm is in. If word gets out to them how strapped we are for cash, there will be a run on the bank. And if the bank can't give these people the money, they'll go after the people they believe can do just that."

He was not entering into hyperbole territory there. Just last month, an account executive at WinstonSHARPE had been found murdered in his San Francisco loft, along with his mistress. Gunshots to the head at point blank range. The holo-console had been left open, the executive's password still active in the system. The authorities believed that a high-value robbery had taken place, with the perpetrators having coerced the executive to transfer a large sum of money from one account to the next before they killed their hostage. The fact that no one stepped forward to declare the money missing (the transaction and affected accounts had been wiped from the records) indicated to the banking world at large that this had been an unorthodox account withdrawal from someone who was a known entity at WinstonSHARPE.

In other words, in the assassin's eyes, this had been a perfectly legal transaction to claim money that was rightfully theirs. WinstonSHARPE had been going through tough times and was circling the drain, as far as companies went. Best guess was that someone wanted to cash out in totality before the bank could go bust and they would lose everything.

Haas-Mase had every right to be worried. SolBanc was not particularly well-known for its due diligence in examining the overall character of its clients. Mainly it had been concerned about the size of their clients' wallets, more than anything else. So, they had accepted anyone who could pay the exorbitant entry charges without much fuss, thinking that the advantages outweighed the positives of having such shady characters on their portfolio. As long as they could pay, what did it matter?

Turns out Haas-Mase was now realizing he was probably going to find out exactly what mattered to the people who entrusted SolBanc with their money.

Qual was already making notes on his omni-tool. "I'm increasing security on your person, just in case. The guards around the house will be doubled and you will have a convoy of private security guards following you wherever you go."

"Do you really think that's necessary?" Haas-Mase asked, but the quarian just levelled an "are-you-serious" stare at him.

"Would you rather proceed with inadequate caution? I can always delegate to insufficiency, if that's what you desire."

Haas-Mase scrunched his mouth from his auditor's sarcasm. "Do as you see fit."

"I always do," Qual said before he lifted a finger. "By the way, I came across something in the asset records that was cryptographically sealed. Plans for a localized data haven somewhere in the former nation of Indonesia. What do you know of it?"

"The Kamojang XII facility? That was built five years ago as a refuge for untaxed data. It was a contingency for the firm, so chosen for the area's poor info-systems enforcement. No extradition that way. What's your interest in it?"

The quarian folded his hands together. Savoring the moment. "Only that it appears to have been collating the entire SolBanc digital infrastructure since it was brought online. Complete records on every account, down to the last kilobyte. But best of all, it's not connected to SolBanc's main network. It's been siphoning data through a web of mirrored instances and virtual domains. To the auditors, it's effectively off the books."

The financier absorbed this for a second. He was a bit embarrassed to admit he had forgotten about the bank's usage of these physical locales for data preservation, but their existence had not seemed pertinent at all. Until now, apparently. Had Qual seen something in them that he could not?

"You think there's something there we can use?"

"Possibly," Qual said. "I'd have to do a little more research. But I have a few ideas as to how we can use it. I'll keep you informed when I get more details."

Haas-Mase studied Qual. Trying to figure out what was going on in that head of his, behind that veil of saffron glass.

"See that you do," he said as he hobbled out of the room, his cane clicking upon floor as he went.

A/N: We're five chapters in, but it really took me until now to realize just how much I missed writing Tali. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed her presence in the last big series I wrote, but since that was a pretty reduced role in comparison, I'm appreciating her scenes so much more right now. It feels good to have her as a main character once again.

Let me know what you think of the story thus far! I'd love to hear from all of you.

Playlist:

The Doctor Will See You Now
"The Last Road"
Ludvig Forssell
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

"Proceed With Inadequate Caution"
"Round One"
Daft Punk
Tron: Legacy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)