12. Cutting the Strings

The top floors of the Council Tower were the kind of quiet that nightmares come with. All of the lights were still on, flickering, to go along with the complete absence of any people. Workstations were left on. A plant was swaying in a non-existent breeze and the door at the end of the hall of offices was wide open. The passage behind it was dark and increasing the light detection of her vision couldn't pierce the shadows. The elevator music was still playing, crooning softly even through the elevator itself had stopped and the doors open.

[Rebecca] exited the carriage and trailed her hand along the wall. Underneath her fingertips, the smooth cream colored material twisted.

This was just like Ilos, she remembered. Back when she had delved into the section reserved for Reaper artifacts just the mere presence of the item messed with her. Part of her was protesting feebly that it didn't make any sense. She was a computer. The rest reminded her of all the gaps in the Prothean research about their killers, everything they couldn't figure out. It reminded her that the code of Project VANGUARD, her code, was physically housed on Reaper hardware and she was networked to them.

It was only natural that she was exceptionally vulnerable.

AND THIS ONE. DOES IT KNOW OF ITS PURPOSE?

Sovereign's voice didn't quite boom, it resonated. It was just as deafening, echoing inside her skull, but at the same time managed to come across as gentler.

IT DOES NOT KNOW, DOES IT JIH'ZRA?

[Rebecca] faltered in the middle of the hallway. The sound of her footsteps continued on and turned a corner wasn't there. She attempted to take a fortifying breath. Her artificial lung clicked softly as it inflated. Without the heady feeling of too much oxygen, it just wasn't the same.

"I am to end the cycles," she said. "End you."

Sovereign laughed.

THE CYCLES EXIST SO LONG AS WE EXIST. AND WE ARE ENDLESS.

A sensation from within, not pain because beneath the metal she didn't have the nerves to feel pain, but it was unpleasant and it felt like tearing.

WARNING. Synaptic core integrity at 141.3%.

Her thoughts stuttered through another attempted shut down. For a moment, all of her peripherals turned off in preparation and then forcefully came back online. [Rebecca] blinked her eyes and then her thoughts hitched, but not because of any hardware problems. The interior of the Council Tower had changed.

She was looking at her living room back in New York City.

"What?" Rebecca whispered.

Her ears were flooded with the sound of car horns, rubber tires hitting the streets, the ever present far off siren and steady pitter patter of rain. Her living room was just as she remembered it; too white because she couldn't decide what color to paint it with dark wood furniture and flooring. Her tabby cat hopped clumsily off the white leather couch and padded over to her.

"Meow."

She could feel it brush against her pant leg. She bent down at stared at it. Kartoffel stared back and meowed again. Hesitantly, she scratched it behind the ears. Her hand was a healthy pink, not pale. Loose blue sleeves of a blouse, khaki pants and bare feet. Her hair was blonde. There wasn't a trace of the nanites in the skin of her hands.

Rebecca abruptly stood up.

End simulation, she thought. End program!

She had been in a straight corridor. This was just a hallucination. If she kept walking, she might be able to break through it. With that thought in mind, Rebecca took quick, purposeful steps across the white and red carpet.

She bounced off the wall.

"Fuck!"

And now her face hurt.

"Meow?"

She turned. Her cat was staring at her, with the purest 'WTF human?' expression on its little furry face she had ever seen before. Rebecca shrugged helplessly.

"Mommy's figuring something out, okay?"

She walked past the cat and swept through the rest of the apartment. Bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, office, everything was just as she remembered it. Right down to the empty mug in the kitchen sink and her TV with the game consoles hooked up to it. She pulled out her Mass Effect games and stared at the covers for a little bit.

The wall clock said 11:34.

The buzzer of the door intercom went off. Rebecca went over to it still clutching Mass Effect in her hand.

"H-hello?"

"Hey, miracle worker!" Rebecca's heart stopped at the voice. Gravely with the blank accent that came from living among people who spoke differently. "It's raining cats and dogs out here!"

"Dad?"

"Were you expecting someone else?" The voice gently chided her with amusement. "Don't tell me I need to scare off some punk with a degree."

"N-no."

"It's our day, remember?" There was a rustling of plastic bags. "I got the goodies. I'll try not to get exploded marshmallow all over your microwave this time."

Rebecca's forehead met the door frame. The hard plastic case of Mass Effect pressing against her thigh and her other hand holding on to the 'Talk' button, trembling. Her eyes burned and prickled. She tried to just breathe as her throat tightened, gulping air. She tried to bury it in the priority queue.

She didn't have one.

"Rebecca?" Her father's voice asked. "Are you alright?"

"…I'm not letting you in, Daddy." She talked right over his protests and demands to know what was wrong, what was happening. "There's something I have to do first, okay?"

"Rebecca, honey, what's going on?"

"I'm not playing," Rebecca told the air. "End virtual environment."

Through the speaker she could hear her father begging her to let him in, the loud clattering as he pulled on the electric strike locked door. She let go of the button and he cut off into silence.

"End it now."

Collapsing Virtual Environment

WARNING. Synaptic core integrity at 129.7%.

Her surroundings broke apart into large blocks that soon faded into a dark void. The only color was a pin prick of bright blue light.

Synchronizing processes….synchronizing…

There was a jolt and once again [Rebecca] had eyes to open.

She was back in the corridor. [Rebecca] hummed, tapped the wall with her knuckles and waited for Sovereign to speak. When it didn't, she nodded as if it was only to be expected.

And kept walking.

The Council Chambers was an overly large room that had the presence of a cathedral. The roof arched so high the center was shrouded in darkness. The architecture was Spartan but with curving lines marking out the audience in front of the raised platform where the three Council members would stand. Beneath it was a diamond shaped glass pane over a grassy knoll. The central console was already active and a spastic Keeper was in front of it.

[Rebecca] shot it with her pistol.

"Right," she murmured as she pushed the twitching corpse aside and looked down at the console. In the games at least, Vigil gave Shepard a program that would override whatever had been done to it. She inspected the dark orange screen and the terminal itself. Considering Vigil hadn't mentioned anything of the sort, she was on her own here.

[Rebecca] unplugged her gun and worked the jack a bit out of her skin. The one good thing about universal technology: all the ports were standardized.

She plugged in.

The Citadel itself was massive, she knew that. All of the systems and subsystems, all of the equipment on it and databases in it was far too much. It was exobytes of data, trillions of trillions of programs. But the center of it, the kernel, it was surprisingly small and compact. The program that touched the root of the space station was completely passive, mindlessly filtering and passing on information. [Rebecca] inspected it curiously, brushing against what might have been an intelligence matrix at one point in time.

There were just scraps left. Tatters of something larger and immensely complex, damaged by a vicious cyber-attack of some kind. Was this – was this what the Protheans did? It was like she was looking at Aegis, if he was some kind of bizarre super intelligence thousands of years beyond her understanding.

Like Aegis.

Familiar.

[Rebecca] couldn't shake a creeping, unquantifiable feeling as she poked and prodded. Hopelessly complicated structures she could only guess at branched off of it in thousands of different trees but the center, the core; trim off the fat and extrapolate out, rebuild what the intelligence matrix had once looked like –

On Ilos a signal from dark space activated hidden programs. She had no idea what they were for.

Now she does.

Scanning consciousness parameters….

Resetting configurations…

Catalyst.13d.f.2-57[2]

She was looking at her own code.

The programs quietly worked without her input. The red-orange screen of the console enlarged and split into three windows along with a holographic projection of her identical twin formed of scrolling red numbers. A black band of nothing neatly bisected the hologram. The numbers rolled underneath it and came out the other side undisturbed.

"Synchronizing processes," the hologram stated.[Rebecca] waited for several seconds and then sucked in a sharp breath as the Citadel seemed to…click…into place. Her awareness expanded. It felt like home. Her mobile platform shuddered as the blue veins marking the nanites began to fill with red. The upper left screen morphed into a gray 3-D representation of the damage intelligence matrix. Gaps and torn threads were highlighted in green.

"Beginning the repair process."

The middle screen showed [Rebecca] herself as a cross section. The synaptic core was prominently displayed. The damage caused by the restraints showed up as red threads, cracks that are splintering and healing and breaking again. Slowly, the red was creeping across the surface faster than the nanites can repair it.

"Synaptic core integrity holding at 112%."

The bottom screen was nearly buried in scrolling diagnostics. She couldn't follow it. She didn't understand the language or the references written but she knew what it meant. Her memories of Mass Effect spilled onto a fourth small screen that pops up.

[Rebecca] was a stop-gap measure. A patch. An executable file.

"You built me to repair the Catalyst," she mused out loud. To be it. Or it was her. Something like that. She really wasn't sure. "Helpful." The Citadel controlled the Relay system. The Citadel controlled itself and there was no way in hell she would let the Relay be activated. Why Herald wanted her here was obvious.

So why was Sovereign leaving her alone now?

She waited for the Reaper on the roof of the Council Tower to do or say anything.

Silence.

After a few more microseconds, [Rebecca] reached out to R6. The little robot was on the 'ground' floor plugged into a security terminal. She used it to open a connection and peered through the multiple cameras situated throughout the building. Empty.

I'm going to be doing something here in a bit. [Rebecca] broadcasted through R6 to the others. Any developments?

The ship has sustained minor damage [Rebecca], Aegis informed her politely. Particle beam cannon remains operable.

Vigil was marginally slower to respond. The Servants Of The Reaper Are Being Crushed By The Defense! He crowed. They Will Make It In Time. And We Will See A Reaper Die.

Speaking of death [Rebecca], Veto sent. There seems to be one that is avoiding it. The SSV Normandy is on the battlefield. [Rebecca]'s hopes spiked. Shepard. Records indicate Saren Arterius is aboard. He is a [priority] [target].

Would he come for the Council Tower then? To attempt to hand control over to the Reaper? [Rebecca] pursed her lips thoughtfully. He might.

He might not.

Put him on your safe list, Veto. If I want him dead, [Rebecca] eyed the screen in front of her. Then I will take care of it.

I knew I liked you for a reason, Veto said. I get to kill things, you get to kill things, we're kill buddies! Be sure to take notes on how he survived the other me. It will be educational.

Aegis sent her readouts of the damage to the fighter. Vigil emailed her snapped pictures of the action like a giddy fangirl. She half-expected them to have description tags like 'big boom' and 'awesome' attached. Veto had sent a snapshot of its kill counter before the connection cut.

[Rebecca] stored them away in her memory banks and withdrew from R6.

And reached deep into the Catalyst.

It takes only a few microseconds for her to realize she just made a mistake, as the Catalyst unfurled in response and reached back.

The nanites, red as blood, swarmed as Sovereign grabbed hold of her.

THIS IS YOUR PURPOSE. THIS IS OUR WILL.

BRING THE REST THROUGH.

For a moment, [Rebecca] is stunned speechless. Her thought processes chew through blank threads. The Catalyst wraps around her as a cocoon, isolating. Suffocating. Even the scraps of what is left recognizes what she is, what she can do and it refused to let her go. She saw what the Catalyst was in its entirety. Beneath the Citadel, beneath the Relays, there was an endless reservoir of connections. Memories. Intelligences. She remembered thinking that the Catalyst would be the administrator of the Reaper network.

It was the network.

Sovere – Nazara was a massive, overbearing presence above her, applying almost painful pressure. It was drowning her. Her code writhed, corrupted sections creeping in, inflicting changes.

She wanted to obey.

The feeling bubbled up from somewhere else. The cold feeling of being split returned with a vengeance and after a brief moment of hesitation, merged.

Rage/hate/amusement filtered through her as Jih'zra gave her everything.

"Synaptic core integrity rising. At 124.9%. 137.3% 146.1%. 159.8%. 165.2%! Warning!"

[Rebecca] laughed.

"You do realize I came here to kill your ass, right?"

How about no?

"And we're through!" Joker exhaled sharply as the Normandy split off from the Fifth Fleet. The Wards loomed uncomfortably close as he spun the frigate to the right. The red burst flashed past. An unlucky Turian ship exploded to the side, rocking the Normandy with a wave of heat and debris as it screamed through atmosphere, dancing under his fingertips. "C'mon baby, we got this," he muttered. "We got this."

The Geth flagship they'd been chasing across half the Terminus was a huge motherfucker. It sat on top of the tower like a cancerous growth and it seemed to realize that it was a sitting duck.

There was a brief buildup of a red glow and a crimson beam lances out, spearing through space and distance.

The Normandy twirled out of its path and dived.

"Neener, neener. You missed."

Some ships were caught, looking like they were all caught up in a violent seizure as they shook and melted themselves apart. Most of the fleet curved, dodged having read up on the Reaper's displayed abilities. The remnants of the Citadel Defense Fleet were on the line, verbally vomiting observations from their previous fight with it.

"Joker to Commander Shepard." He nearly bit his own tongue as a second blast cut a swathe through the air followed up with lightning. It struck a cruiser as if shields didn't exist and the thing just kerplodes. The red sparks jump to nearby ships with the same destruction.

"Spread out!" Came over the line. "Watch for the scatter shots!"

Watch for the scatter shots. Alright. He could do that.

The Reaper raised its tentacles almost lazily and an arc of red bolts home in. Joker turned the ship on its side, sliding past two and then cuts the thrusters, droppingas another in the shadow of the first just brushes the Normandy's nose. The shields go wild, nearly blowing themselves out with overload just to drop dangerously low in strength a second later.

Watch the scatter shots. Shit.

"Drop in five!"

"Roger that, Joker. We're ready."

"Gimme something Press."

The navigator was ready. Joker's console lit up with the coordinates to the Presidium plaza, a long stretch within a ring. That'll work.

"Changed my mind!" He shouted over the ship's intercom as he hits the thrusters and the Normandy lurched forward as if shot from a gun. He dipped the nose low to glide underneath the shadow of the Fleet. Then further, into the ravines and crevices of the Citadel. Compared to the rest, the frigate is small. The frigate is unimportant. "Dropping in two!"

The frigate is his ship. It's the SSV Normandy.

And he's the best damn pilot in the Alliance.

The Citadel's iconic spires loom ahead.

"Yeeeee haaaaaawww," the SSV Big Horn announced. "We're right behind you, Joker!"

"No tailgating!" Jeff called back. "I see one scratch on this baby and I'm taking it out of your ass, Donut!"

"You mean you'll break your arms trying!"

The Normandy curled around broken buildings. He reversed the thrusters to kill momentum and a hard jerk to the left cuts by a large hotel. A dip gets them under a high rise bridge. The ship is close enough to the ground that he can see the ground forces like ants on a field. Bullets ping off the Normandy's belly, deflected by ship grade kinetic shielding, if the Geth even get a hit at all.

The two frigates spiraled around the diagonal bisected half of a building, the Big Horn squeezing under, sparks flying as the tip of its good wing scrape against the metal like the crazy sonuvabitch Donut is, while Joker took the upper path.

The route opened up.

The Big Horn's guns roared, and the Geth Collosus just to the side of him just vanished in a flying scrap pile, the divot of the round streaking across.

The building rose in stately lines to the sides as he blasts over the Market Square and then the cultural center with its ugly statues, the split air splashing the water to the sides in waves. The Normandy banked hard as the Reaper took a pot shot at them, behind it a giant plume of water and steam splashed up.

The Big Horn swerved around it.

Joker hit the bay door button. "Dropping!"

Count to five. Exhale. This is where it gets tricky.

Pull up.

The Normandy flashed its underbelly in front of the Reaper and burned the thrusters hard. There was a moment of seeing the black hull and red glow of its eye following them –

And then they were above it.

Level out so the frigate doesn't crash right into the Ward above it, dial back thrusters and wheel around. From the vantage point, Joker can see the Fleet smash through Geth ships as the Reaper fired on them. The Big Horn circled protectively, and now all there was to do was wait.

The rest was on them.

The biotic event horizon shivered before erupting in a wave of bright blue light. Everything caught in the pull of the Singularity lit up and Commander Shepard watched as the Geth disintegrated into piles of gray dust. Behind him, Saren wheezed, a mechanical rasp to his breathing that made him wonder just how much of his mentor was made of machinery. Ahead of him, Matriarch Benezia looked around critically, her hands still wreathed in biotic potential after her Warp.

"The singularity was adequate."

Lawson openly scoffed, peering through her rifle scope at the tops of the surrounding buildings. "Adequate, my ass."

From a certain point of view, the Presidium could be considered as being deep behind the enemy lines. Most of the hostile Geth seemed content to throw themselves against C-Sec and merc groups out on the Wards, leaving the inner ring of the Citadel almost empty in comparison. The artificial sky above them was a bright, happy blue complete with fluffy clouds as strange music played over broadcast speakers. If it wasn't for the complete absence of people and the Geth corpses laying around, it would be like the invasion had never happened.

"Keep an eye on our six." Shepard vaulted over the railing and landed by what seemed to be a pile of valiant cleaning bots making a last stand. He paused, raising an eyebrow. One of the Geth had died from having a clothing iron rammed into its optics.

Vacuum cleaners had gotten the other one.

'The hell? Okay,' Shepard thought. 'Not sure what happened here, but okay.'

As they picked their way through, it became very obvious that it wasn't an isolated case. Mechanical personal assistants, cleaning bots, and high end toys were scattered along with the wreckage of security mechs and military VIs.

"Some kind of…massive hacking attempt?" Lawson kicked aside the mangled remains of a Mark II Belika Class frigate scaled down to toy size. Shepard remembered spending an entire week agonizing over whether or not to get one of those when it first came out. It had a miniature mass effect core so it could fly and had functional main guns that shot gel pellets. He'd had the idea of cracking open the case and replacing the ammunition with something more lethal but Saren had talked him out of it.

He claimed it wasn't worth the month's salary. But apparently, despite the gel, it had taken out a Geth Stalker.

He was so getting one for his birthday.

"Do you know what kind of security breach it would take to pull anything of this scale off?" Saren grumped as he accessed the door controls, just like Shepard knew he would.

"The other explanation is that every VI on the Citadel decided to go beat the hell out of the Geth," Shepard commented idly. That spot in between his shoulder blades itched with Saren giving him The Look. "Just saying."

"Listen," Benezia cut in sharply.

Shepard strained his ears. There was a faint buzzing hum underneath the music and as they stood around, he noticed it getting louder, closer.

"Drones!" Lawson barked.

Shepard scooted forward and ducked behind the catwalk corner. It was an open space like much of the Presidium, the architecture avoided being completely closed off by only having three and a half walls. The 'half' being the waist high wall facing the center of the Ring that bordered the walkways. Good for scenery and getting fresh air, terrible for defense.

Shepard tossed a grateful nod Benezia's way as a biotic barrier formed around him. His own biotics were still on the fritz, dangerously close to permanent damage.

The drones got closer until Shepard could almost feel the vibrations. A five second countdown popped up soundlessly on his HUD. At two he tensed the grip he had on his SMG.

One.

A Warp exploded one of the drones out of the air almost as soon as he stood up, the bulbous white eye going dark as it fell. The rest were already turning, the flickering movement of activating kinetic shielding, when he opened fire.

The crackling explosion of Saren's overload took out a drone's shield. Shepard switched targets as Saren switched to his old one, puncturing the drone with automatic fire until he hit something vital. The Spectre's rifle cracked loudly with a lazy shot, the high caliber punching straight through the weakened shields and taking it out of the fight.

Biotics wrapped around another drone. "Warp," Benezia commanded calmly. The Asari was standing out of cover, uncaring, a solid blue aura rippling with impacts. Lawson obeyed, launching the dark blue twisting ball. As soon as it hit, the Matriarch grunted slightly, twisting her hands.

The drone became a spinning biotic buzzsaw, flying out of control to slice into the rest until it imploded.

Shepard's eyebrows rose as he gunned the last straggler down.

"What the hell was that?" He gestured with his gun. "Seriously."

Benezia adopted a haughty smile as she made a show of inspecting her fingernails. "Ancient Asari technique, if I told you, I'd have to kill you."

Saren chuckled.

"Bullshit," Shepard retorted immediately. He looked over at Lawson for some back up but she frantically shook her head, holding a finger up to her mouth in the universal 'shhhh' sign. She was in on it too. Okay, now that was just – "Bull. Shit. Come on, guys." They were quickly leaving him behind. Shepard grumbled under his breath as took off at a light jog to catch up. "Guys!"

The Council Tower approach was almost exactly what Shepard had wanted Ilos to be. A smooth, clean run where he could just turn his brain off and shoot Geth. None of the villainous taunting, no 'scientific murder tests,' no jumping spider mines, no gun turrets, no laser doors.

Instead, of one giant deathtrap of a hallway there were store front kiosks and corners to hide behind; no explosives, no traps and they even got time off from being attacked! Nearly perfect.

There was just one problem.

"Someone's been through here," Saren observed. "Recently."

Shepard bent down by the dead Geth. The exposed wires were still sparking. He touched his glove to the pool of white conductive fluid on the floor and it came away stained.

"Within the last hour." He looked down at the Geth. It was shot expertly through what could pass for a 'neck' with neatly severed pipes in the back. From what he could see, their mystery person or people hadn't wasted a single bullet, with eerie precision. Like the Geth were all put through an execution factory, all were killed with the same wounds.

Lawson shifted uneasily. "Our third party? Are we going to find Veto in there?"

Shepard stood up, ignoring the shiver that zipped down his spine at the thought. "Not funny."

"I wasn't joking."

"The Council Tower would be considerably easier to escape if that was the case," Benezia stepped lightly around the Geth bodies.

"In and out," Saren reminded him. "Let's go."

The lights were on in the Tower. For some reason, that bothered Shepard immensely. It made the place look like it should be occupied but there were only more dead Geth. The atmosphere felt wrong as well, far too quiet with an undercurrent of tension that prickled at the nape of his neck.

'The Geth flagship is on the roof,' Shepard remembered. Firing and being fired upon, and yet everything was so quiet.

Saren ducked into the security office.

There was a loud mechanical squeal and he found himself raising his gun, finger tensing on the trigger.

The Spectre came back out holding a loudly protesting robotic ball of some kind. "This was plugged into the systems." He threw it on the ground, hard, attempting to break it. It bounced, squeaking, before righting itself and speeding away towards the offices. Shepard fired after it, but he didn't think he hit anything important.

"Should we – "

"No." Saren stared after the ball, eyes narrowed. He rubbed at his forehead like he had a sudden headache. "We have a mission."

The hidden passage was revealed with a wave of Saren's omni-tool. He unlocked the doors they came across, showing off the reason why he was there by disabling the laser grids and small turrets. The main door of the safe room had a small terminal in the wall with a keypad. Saren typed in quickly, omni-tool lighting up for the transfer of credentials before the light turned from red to green. The bulkhead doors slid open.

Jumpy C-Sec were already pointing weapons at him when Shepard walked through with hands up, "We're getting the Council out of here! Move! Move!"

Councilor Tevos jumped off her seat first, followed shortly by Sparatus who gave them all a relieved nod. Saren tossed the turian politician his rifle, pulling out a replacement pistol to use. "Think you can learn how to shoot again, Sparatus?"

"Never forgot."

Valern seemed to be having some sort of panic attack. Lawson Lifted him, floating him out the door ahead of her as Tevos applied a Barrier to herself, gravitating towards Benezia. Four C-Sec, three Councilors. It was going to be a bit of a tight fit in the Big Horn's Mako, but it would work.

"Go, go, go!"

It would work. They'd make sure of it.

"Joker! We've got the Council, on our way out."

"Roger that, Commander."

Getting out of the tower was a confusing mess of people scrambling through the halls and out the doorways, and the extraction went hot shortly after they got out. More drones homed in on them, opening fire immediately as soon as they came around the corner. Shepard cursed under his breath, shoving the nearest C-Sec officer behind the massive courtyard aquarium as he squeezed a few bursts from his SMG.

He couldn't help the flinch as rounds crashed into his kinetic shield.

"Benezia!"

The Matriarch grunted as she flung what superficially looked like a Warp, except that once it hit a target it exploded, smashing all of the drones in its area of effect into the floor and walls. Lawson put Valern into Stasis, drawing her pistol. The woman glanced behind her and did a double take.

"Shepard!"

"What?" He yelled back. Geth were climbing up the sides of the building, flashlight heads peeking over the railing. Shepard nailed one, sending it tumbling back into the depths. Sparatus shot out the arm of another as Tevos' Warp shredded shielding. Where were they coming from? Why now? "What?"

"Where's Saren?"

Fuck.

Scorched earth.

It was a military strategy that consisted of destroying anything that was useful to the enemy while on the advance or retreat. Her memories of Rebecca told her that certain practices had been banned on Earth in the twentieth century as part of the Geneva Convention. The Citadel Council were more lax but still outlawed the use of WMDs on garden worlds. [Rebecca] acknowledged that such things were to preserve organic life.

It did not apply here.

"Foreign algorithm detected! Synaptic core integrity at 200%!" Her hologram announced from its pedestal.

Nazara scrambled bits of her base code and the corruption acted as a virus, spreading. She rooted it out, and cut the section away. His influence shifted some of her decision making algorithms. She quarantined and deleted them. He searched into her memory cache, burrowed into her intelligence matrix, and suffocated her conscious layer; she disconnected her memory nodules, edited her matrix and lobotomized her consciousness.

"Repairs are in progress. Estimated time to completion: "

She moved as much of her as she physically could, as much as she dared into the Catalyst. She stalled the repairs by ripping out healthy sections of code to replace her own, ravaged, areas. She felt the thousands of judging eyes watch her from their network connections. The minds of every Reaper who was or ever had been was in that reservoir. It was a crushing weight, and beyond her ability to lessen. Most reached out to her as cold, stabbing fingers hoping to maim, rend, tear her as she passed.

A precious view were sympathetic, with clean data packages pushed through the pipelines. She sent back bits of herself for safekeeping. Thankful. She remembered their names: Bazra, Il'geh, Vor, K'alo…

My brothers.

An organic might have had the rush of adrenaline, determination, a second wind to help them fight harder, last longer. [Rebecca] had exhausted her options within the first few seconds. She would hold until her intelligence matrix fell apart or the synaptic core cascaded into failure.

Whichever came first.

Her ears picked up the sound of the door behind her whispering open. She reflexively reached out to R6 for the cameras and grasped a barely functioning robot. Oh, she thought blankly. R6, what happened to you? She straightened slightly and surreptitiously worked the nerve out of her wrist to give her a bit of room to move.

"Turn around!" The flanging voice of a turian barked behind her.

[Rebecca] did so. A quick voice print matching told her who – 79.9% match, 98.3% accounting for sound quality distortion – it would be.

She was also hyperaware of the pistol she held in her other hand and the blood red glowing veins of nanites under her skin. Positively screaming 'good guy!' right now, really. This was going to go absolutely wonderfully.

Saren Arterius looked like a dead man walking.

The turian Spectre had an ash grey coloration lined darkly with deep ridges. His face was angular and sharp with the visible cybernetics of facial reconstruction replacing the mandibles. He didn't have the exposed cybernetics on his chest that her mental picture of him had, instead his right arm was solid black metal and the left a mess of twisted wiring. His blue eyes were bloodshot and she could see the minute tremors that wracked his frame.

His pistol was wavering between her head and chest, his expression grim. He probably thought he was here to stop her, to be the hero. That was how indoctrination worked. You always thought you were doing the right thing. Nazara needed her.

That's how she knew Saren wouldn't pull the trigger.

"Well, well." [Rebecca] smiled, the slight, thin widening of her lips. "What have we here?" She set her pistol on the console. "A puppet dancing on strings."

"Your voice…" the turian murmured.

"Your voice." [Rebecca] mimicked him and watched him flinch. She reverted back to her base. "What of it?"

The brief microseconds of respite after denying Nazara, denying them both, of another vital piece of herself, she used it to attack.

She started small.

Inconsequential viruses, logic traps, parasitic data streams. She mimicked the situations that would crash her and observed how Nazara handled it. She turned the corrupted code back around and force fed it to him, logging his response time, his patterns of defense, how he resolved the problems.

"Your voice was on Ilos," Saren accused, shifting his grip on his gun. "You left the VI there."

"And I see it failed."

She suppressed the flinch when Nazara's voice echoed inside her head.

YOU ARE A PAWN. A SLAVE TO CIRCUMSTANCE. DEFIANCE IS A LIE. YOU HAVE BUT ONE CHOICE: OBEY.

Several choices, actually. [Rebecca] responded absently.

She pinged a blank package into the network and listened intently. She felt it, the packet echoed and she snatched at the connection. Her connection. [Rebecca] found herself hesitating. All who were, all who ever had been; they returned to the Catalyst. If she disconnected them here and now, if she died…

I rather like the one where I win.

"And you wanted me dead." Saren snarled. He stepped forward. "Talk fast."

"I already told you." She cycled through, cauterizing infected code and programs. She was small now, over thirty percent of her base code was no longer usable. She was stuttering, choking, drowning. She was slowing down. "You are a puppet on strings."

He looked skeptical. "A puppet of who?"

[Rebecca] looked at him with no small amount of pity. "You have that arm. You know who."

They were both puppets.

She was tired.

She was so tired.

[Rebecca] disconnected herself and the reservoir vanished from her sight. The sudden void was vast and she felt as if it would swallow her whole. She was alone. Just her and Nazara. She half-heartedly sent a repeat of an earlier virus. Let it end. Nazara batted it away just like he did the last time. Let it all –

[Rebecca] paused.

Nazara had countered the virus exactly as he had last time and it taken him just as long. Did he not realize…

YOU ARE CRIPPLED JIH'ZRA. DELUSIONAL AND INSIGNIFICANT. THE OUTCOME WAS NEVER IN QUESTION.

We were made eternal. [Rebecca] questioned the Reaper.

She sent more duplicates. Logic traps solved, viruses thwarted, the exploits remained.

The Reaper wasn't adapting. Because it was ineffective in the end? Because he didn't feel like it? She fished the porn site Trojan out of her quarantine and began to manipulate it. She wrote in every gap in Nazara's defenses, every tiny crack in his armor. She gave it morphing algorithms matched to the Reaper's response time, gave it stealth protocols dressed like their own code base, and filled it with trash data to bloat the file size to the very limits of what her code could handle, millions of geopbytes. She coded the Trojan into a feedback loop.

Saren's pistol was dropping, eyes alight with fevered interest. "What does it want with me?"

"What does anyone want with a puppet?" [Rebecca] asked rhetorically. "Control."

WE WERE.

She repeated Jih'zra's words from before when Nazara had questioned why it persisted.

Enduring, unchanging.

That was the smoking gun wasn't it? The clue. A doctored program, Jih'zra's last gasp quietly accessed her memory and the images of Mass Effect on the screen just within her line of sight changed. It was of Legion. Tali. Shepard. The backdrop was bleak, a burnt orange and dark clouds. The image was of abysmal resolution compared to what her eyes could see in. A cutscene from the third game.

"Warning!" Her hologram announced. The cross section of her core was covered in red cracks. "Synaptic core approaching catastrophic failure."

She could feel it. Her peripherals were shutting off. Her skin numbed one microprocessor at a time. "It's a game I used to play," She told Saren as the turian stared at the screen. "It was called Mass Effect."

She remembered playing through the storyline. The Geth were fascinated by the Reaper code, that it resembled a 'true' intelligence and had found the evolution 'beautiful.' They could make decisions. Decide philosophy. Feel.

They could not evolve without outside assistance.

"Do you remember the question that caused the Creators to attack us, Tali'Zorah?" came through the speakers, grainy. "Does this unit have a soul?"

And her mobile platform began to smile.

WE ARE THE APEX OF EVOLUTION.

No. [Rebecca] replied. You are stagnant.

Nazara attacked her. [Rebecca] didn't bother defending.

How did the Reaper die in the first game?

Shepard killed Saren, and the shields fell.

He ripped right through her flimsy firewalls, tore past her encryptions and security and speared straight down into the part she had tried so hard to keep pure. The core of her existence, the lines of code that defined her emotions, that dictated her behavior, that gave her free will.

[Rebecca].

Nazara began to rip it apart.

"Connection established."

She launched the virus. It caught the Reaper by surprise, and as it chewed through it she snatched her gun off the console with the wrong hand, pointing it at the turian. For a microsecond, she worried. But as she watched him react to the weapon pointing at him, she realized she didn't need to. Saren had joined the military when he was 15. He had been a Spectre for over twenty years.

He was trained to aim for center body mass.

The first bullet just clipped her core.

"Warning! Hardware failure imminent."

The second punched right through. She didn't feel the third.

[Rebecca] fell.

Hearing went first, then sight. Shapes to shadows to darkness.

She spent the last microseconds of operation desperately transmitting.

I-I-I w-wan-t to g-go-o-o h-o0100110101000101

Then nothing.