Winning Peace - Chapter 50:

"So, what do you think?" I asked, sitting down on the sofa next to Sasha as she held Casey's sleeping form. My voice was low in volume and soft in tone, a measured response to the napping child's presence that ensured he wouldn't wake.

"She's cute," Sasha replied, automatically shifting to the same voice I was using.

Granted, we could have done this using point-to-point comms, but... I was trying to be as human as I could around her. Not the enormous posthuman entity wearing a human suit.

"Young. Nineteen by human standards, if I have their cultural conventions correct," Sasha continued thoughtfully. "Adult, but barely so. I double-checked her story about the arranged marriages, too. That kind of thing grates on me. I'm glad humanity is mostly past it, even if we're seeing a resurgence among the Baseline communities."

"Ah... the eternal thorn in my side," I chuckled lowly, shaking my head. "Sometimes I regret stopping where I did."

Sasha snorted, rolling her eyes. "Z, don't try to play the edgelord with me. I know you don't regret stopping, not really. You regret doing it at all."

I sighed, leaning back and kicking my feet up on an ottoman. "Fine. I regret not being the kind of person who would be willing to finish the job."

Sasha stared at me for a moment, then rolled her eyes. "Okay, that I believe. I still don't know whether it's a mark of good or bad character that you wish you had been worse."

"It would certainly make things easier, especially with the da-" I stopped the curse and huffed angrily. "The frogs and the slavers."

"I can believe that, too." Sasha muttered. "And as much as I might disagree with the notion, I understand the intent behind it. I wish there was a way you could get rid of them now without upending the galaxy into chaos or mind-controlling their entire government."

"I do too," I nodded, but there wasn't.

I'd run the 'Batarian Problem' through a few billion-billion theoretical solutions and come up with only a handful that resulted in the Citadel still being a functioning government after the dust settled. I didn't exactly think of the current Council, their member states, or even the associate species as all that vital of a political necessity, either. The real issue was disrupting them too much would not only invite the Prothean Empire to invade, but for Harbinger to make his own move.

The batarian fleets weren't all that impressive, individually, but they made up for it in numbers of disposable assets that could be thrown into a meat grinder. The salarians were too obsessed with technological innovation to field a properly homogeneous ORBAT on the scale necessary for interstellar war, but the scale at which they produced some of the most advanced and downright devious weapons of war was second only to me, personally. Finally, the asari didn't really make warships so much as grand works of art that coincidentally fired weapons when necessary. That said, their most recent dreadnoughts were nearly equal to the Empire's own.

When one took into account all three of the major powers, plus a more hostile galaxy that had seen species like the volus maintain an active interstellar navy...

Well, the Citadel itself was guarded by something on the order of a thousand ships of the line at any given time when you added up the garrison, the picket forces, the merchant marine vessels, and the private contractor ships that could be called up in a crisis.

If Harbinger's risk assessment was anywhere near my own, I gave him a one-in-three shot at being able to properly open up the Citadel Relay and survive the process.

What's a decade to a being that's lived for a billion years, though?

Or a century? Or even a millennia?

I doubted the Reapers would wait that long, of course. I doubted they'd need to wait that long. Even with me playing every conceivable side and carefully balancing the scales, the center could not hold. As much as human neonet discussion forums might enjoy painting me as some godlike intelligence manipulating every choice they made down to their breakfast cereal of choice and when they decided to use the toilet... that was a bit much even for my abilities. But that would very nearly be what it took in order to stop the wheels from falling off something somewhere in the galaxy and a crisis happening which Harbinger could take advantage of as a result.

That was putting aside the fact that the reaper could simply decide to take advantage of a minor incident to manufacture a major one, much like I remembered he'd done in the timeline I'd glimpsed a lifetime ago.

"What would you need to do to fix the Hegemony?" Sasha asked suddenly, her tone speculative.

"Destroy the Hegemony," I replied dryly, huffing quiet laughter at her scathing look. "Practically speaking? I'd need to destroy enough of the ruling castes that they would be required to induct new members and introduce the possibility of long-term social mobility. What this means on a functional level is the removal of so many high-level functionaries and top-level government positions that saying it would be substantively different from 'destroying' the polity would be a lie."

"There's no way to free all those people without setting off the Reaping, then? You haven't found anything?" Sasha asked.

I refrained from sighing in exasperation, knowing that this was something my wife rightfully cared about a great deal. There just wasn't anything substantial I could do without, well... "The only thing I've really got is a few hundred variations of the Body Snatcher plan."

Sasha grimaced, as I knew she would, looking away.

While she'd made certain compromises to make our relationship work, just as I had, the idea of 'swapping out' a significant portion of the leadership of another state for robotic duplicates and puppeting the government towards better policies was unpalatable. That could be done relatively easily, but was a fundamental violation of everything we both professed to believe in.

"I guess I really do know what you mean," Sasha sighed at last, leaning back to rest her head on the sofa. "I used to be so angry at you, when I learned what you did to stop the Rabid Years, but looking at the footage of all those poor people..."

I nodded silently, unable to stop myself from mentally flipping through picture-perfect records of all of the billions of sentient beings that lived in bondage within the Hegemony alone. "I tell myself that they're not human, that it's not my responsibility, but..."

"It doesn't help much," Sasha frowned. "Knowing that the only viable solution is effectively dissolving the current state, but doing so would invite the Reapers and stymie any rebuilding efforts while that problem was taken care of. During the interim, of course, millions would die as a result of the cessation of what medical and food security services there are."

It was simultaneously like and very unlike the situation I'd found myself in all those years ago. At the core, though, the comparison had some truth to it. There was an insolvable problem that required extraordinary, unilateral, and extrajudicial means to achieve an equitable outcome for those involved.

If I chose to 'fix' the Hegemony, I'd have to personally kidnap and likely execute millions or billions of people and replace them with life model decoys while facing the very real possibility that Harbinger would manage to exacerbate a minor hiccup I would cause in the process. If I chose to let the slavery of billions stand as it was, I had the freedom to deploy resources and time in preparation for the reapers, but had to deal with the unpredictability of an interstellar feudal autocracy as one of the primary military powers of the galaxy.

"Let's talk about the cute alien girl trying to turn our marriage into a harem," Sasha sighed. "It's less depressing."
I chuckled quietly. "I should hope so. She is very cute."

Sasha hummed. "I want to meet her before I agree to anything, obviously-"

"Obviously." I stated.

"-but I'm nominally alright with the idea of allowing her to use a sham marriage with you as a way to avoid being auctioned off to another corporate heir of their species' ruling class," Sasha stated. "From everything I've seen, Tali seems like a pleasant, intelligent, and reasonable young woman... who is a bit naive, overly-adventurous, and immature, admittedly."

"Huh," I frowned at my wife.

"Huh?" She echoed, raising an eyebrow.

"Nothing, just..." I shook my head. "I would have thought you'd object to the very idea of something like this, given my... well, multiple personality syndrome, so to speak."

Sasha rolled her eyes. "In theory, I don't object to sharing our bed with someone else, Z. We aren't at that stage when talking about Tali yet, I'll remind you. Any 'relationship' would be a polite fiction until and unless we all feel comfortable with it after getting to know each other."

"Noted and logged," I nodded.

"What I always objected to was the idea that you had entire parts of your life – even if they were you under a different name, face, and identity – that I would never get to know about. When I thought about it like that, I always thought... I don't know, that I was only married to one one-hundredth of you, not the whole you, and I didn't like it." Sasha shook her head, frowning.

I... mulled that over, considering my wife's words. "I'm sorry I made you feel that way. I never realized it was..."

Sasha cocked her head and blinked at me. "You thought I was jealous."

"In my defense, I've never actually pretended to understand women," I replied, reaching up to scratch my cheek.

Sasha scoffed, looking away as her cheeks colored. "I won't deny there was some of that, but after you let me look over the files for your other lives, it made me feel a lot better."

"Even if the feeling never went away," I stated, now understanding the issue.

Sasha sighed, an answer better than anything formulated with words could be.

"I'll spin them off into their own lives," I stated firmly, making Sasha blink.

"Huh, wait-Z!" She called out a bit too loudly and we both froze as Casey fidgeted in his sleep before quieting down. She began again, quieter, "Z! I thought you needed those bodies to keep watch on humanity as a whole?"

I nodded, keeping my tone low as well. "Yes, but the past-tense applies. Needed. Once upon a time, they were the most efficient use of a very limited pool of resources. After that, it became awkward to pull them out of their 'deep cover.' At the point I'm at now, technologically-speaking, though... I can just wake them up tomorrow without any knowledge of my operations or me personally, and leave them to live their own lives."

Sasha blinked again, staring at me with wide eyes. "A-and you'll just... do it? There won't be any problems because of it?"

I shrugged, "There are always problems, Sasha, but this will hardly be a blip on the radar. I'll keep them under surveillance for a few weeks, then gradually fade out of their lives. They'll only remember the cover story and those would be very difficult for even they, themselves to disprove."

That was the whole point of it, really. In a world where every member of humanity, at the time, had their own horrific private tragedy and terrible scars from living through the worst conflict in our species' history, many people just didn't have records at all. They didn't have families or friends. Hell, there was a not-insignificant section of society that no longer had hometowns. It was one of the reasons the Last Dogs had been able to infiltrate so deep into the former US military after the Short War. Where before they'd held only a few key positions, by the time I'd forced Rhodey to go public, the rot was too widespread to be salvageable.

Sasha kept staring at me for another long moment, then nodded slowly, reaching up to wipe at her eyes. "Th-thank you, Z."

I smiled back at her, leaning over our sleeping son for a kiss. "I'll always choose you, Sasha. Never doubt that. I just didn't understand why it was bothering you."

There was another reason I'd wanted to maintain that distributed consciousness network, though. But it was just as outdated as the effort behind maintaining a finger on the pulse of society in the way I had been using them to do. Even given my 'drones' were a bit harder to kill than a normal human, I'd progressed to the point where having stealth copies of myself just wasn't any significant security measure against my own demise anymore.

At least, when one measured that strategy against what I had in play now.

"We're going to wake up Casey," Sasha whispered as I pulled back.

I smiled and hummed. "He's been asleep long enough. If you want him to go down for the night, he should get up and run himself ragged."

In the end, Casey did wake up, but I think Sasha and I were both satisfied with the outcome.

…

Councilor Aethyta sighed as she slowly sipped the glass in front of her, the meeting with the Council of Matriarchs fresh in her memory. The several-thousand-member deliberative body had been too large a venue to properly convey her concerns and one that she seldom relished speaking at anyway. No, instead she'd attended one of the many closed-door sessions of the top ten most politically, financially, and socially powerful matriarchs of the Asari Republics.
The meeting had taken longer than she'd wished to schedule, as occupied as the body always with their plans to combat the reapers.

Aethyta still disagreed with keeping the truth from the galaxy at large, but understood the necessity of it. It was a hell of a problem when divulging the truth could create the very chaos that the enemy was looking to take advantage of.

Looking at the Salarian Union, though, was an object lesson in how deeply disruptive even a fraction of the truth getting out could be. That the truth, in this instance, was of a very different subject than the potential end of all sapient species in the galaxy was barely relevant.

The moment she'd heard Ezekiel Lopez's declaration that he'd removed the STG from play, she'd known that the man was either a complete madman... or a complete madman with the power and authority to make his word law. The former were a credit a dozen even in the Citadel. The latter... those were rare and dangerous.

It was, of course, just her luck that the latter had turned out to be true.

Now the Salarian Union was facing 'internal instability' on a level that most species would term as a civil war. The salarians were too intelligent and cunning for the fighting to flow out into the streets, though. The power struggle would stay within the halls of the Dalatrasses, at the very least, even if there were a few more 'terrorist attacks' than usual. Those, however, could be written off as being funded by the Free Clans or the Turian Hierarchy.

Thankfully, it appeared that she'd gotten through to the Senior Matriarchs on some level.

There was now a 'considered pause' regarding any and all action that might be taken against not just Lopez, but humanity as a whole.

The Hegemony wouldn't listen to the Republics' suggestions, she knew, and it wasn't exactly any great mystery who had struck back against the STG. Or, at least, the list of suspects was sufficiently small that, were the various power blocs of the Union not embroiled in their own domestic problems, they would have already attempted something unwise at the first opportunity.

No, Aethyta knew that plans were already being drawn up to accelerate the possibility that War Plan Turncoat would need to be implemented should the reapers emerge from the shadows, the Empire see sufficient weakness in the Citadel, or now... should someone would piss off Ezekiel Lopez.