The Reaper War

by Cole Price

  There.

  Deep in Shepard’s mind, an echo. Something else doubling his thoughts. The mysterious implant, buried deep in his brain?

  I remembered the violent reaction he had exhibited two nights before, and pulled away at once. Fortunately he showed no signs of harm this time. “It’s there. How did you know?”

  “Call it a hunch. The first time you noticed it, we had been at close quarters with a Reaper a few hours before. The second time we had been in Bryson’s lab, where his assistant fell under Leviathan’s control.”

  “You think it’s a reaction, to whatever force causes indoctrination?”

  “I’d say that’s a good working hypothesis, wouldn’t you?”

  I thought hard for a moment, and then nodded in agreement.

  “Javik, anything else on that pad?”

  “Encrypted data. Also eight missed calls from someone named Dr. Ann Bryson.”

  “That would be Garret’s daughter,” I told them. “I’ve never met her, but Garret mentioned her several times while we were on Thessia together. She’s an archaeologist as well.”

  “I saw her name on some of Dr. Bryson’s records back on the Citadel,” said Shepard. “I think she’s on Task Force Aurora as one of the field researchers.”

  Behind us, the door opened.

  Shepard and I both turned, our weapons at the ready.

  Three of the miners entered the chamber, two humans and an asari, unarmed and looking rather confused. “Who . . . who are you? What are you doing here?” asked one, a human female I had last seen in the mineral labs.

  “I’m Commander Shepard, with the Alliance Navy. Are you all right?”

  “I . . . I think so. I feel strange . . . but all right.”

  Shepard pointed to Garneau’s body. “Do you recognize this man?”

  The asari shook her head in confusion. “I’ve never seen him before in my life. What’s he doing here?”

  “Someone here killed him.”

  “Someone . . . here?” The asari brought a hand up to rub at her forehead. “How is that possible?”

  “There was an artifact here. A sphere, made of some kind of crystal. Do you know where it came from?”

  The other human, a male, looked over at what remained of the rock outcropping. “Yeah. It came out of the mine. Head office was supposed to send someone, but . . .”

  “Something happened,” said the woman. “I remember being someplace else. Someplace cold and dark.”

  “Yes,” the asari agreed. “If dark was a feeling, that’s exactly what I felt too.”

  “Cortez,” Shepard called. “Garneau is a no-go, but we have some new data. I think we’re ready for pickup. What’s your situation?”

  “All green, Commander. Strangest thing. Just a few minutes ago, the Reaper forces packed up and left. I shouldn’t have any problem coming in to pick you up.”

  “Reaper?” asked the male human. “What’s a Reaper?”

  Shepard caught my eye. I shrugged helplessly.

  Sorry, my love, I’m out of ideas too.

  “What year do you think this is?” Shepard asked gently.

  “What year?” The female human stopped to think. “It’s 2176.”

  “That was ten years ago.”

  “What? How is that possible?” All three of the miners exchanged shocked glances.

  Shepard turned to me. “Let’s arrange for these people to be picked up and taken to temporary quarantine.”

  “Ten years,” I said in wonder. “They’re going to have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “This is not like indoctrination at all,” said Javik. “No creature could live under Reaper indoctrination for ten years, and emerge with its mind intact.”

  “Leviathan must have something else,” Shepard agreed. “Similar, and in some ways more effective. I’m betting it works through those artifacts we’ve been seeing.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “They must be very powerful, and very dangerous.”

  “And one of them is sitting right on the Citadel, in the middle of the Presidium, with no safeguards on it at all.” Shepard’s face looked like a carving out of stone. “We had better hurry home.”

  Chapter 26 : Daughters of Wisdom

  12 May 2186, Spectre Corps Headquarters/Citadel

  “Human. Shepard. Spectre status recognized.”

  “Hello, Commander.” The turian behind the security desk checked his instruments and nodded in satisfaction. “You check out okay. Your guests will need to sign in.”

  I had visited the Spectre headquarters before, delivering intelligence or scientific briefings to Shepard and his colleagues, so I found the place familiar. Dr. Chakwas, on the other hand, looked around with keen interest.

  “We’ll need a secure conference room and a QEC channel,” said Shepard.

  “Not a problem,” the turian replied. “Room Gamma is open. I’ll set up the channel there.”

  We found our way to the conference room, activated the security systems, and sat down. The call went through almost at once. Light sprang up on the far side of the table, an image flickering into existence: Miranda Lawson, wearing civilian clothes and an unhappy expression.

  “Shepard. Glad to see you’re all right. Could you have the Shadow Broker call off her dogs? They’re likely to get me killed if they’re not careful.”

  I leaned forward. “I apologize, Miranda, but the matter is urgent and we couldn’t afford to take too long to find you.”

  Miranda frowned, glancing at Dr. Chakwas. “Shepard, is something wrong?”

  “Apparently so,” said Shepard. He operated the teleconference controls and brought up imagery of his deep brain structure. “Miranda, what do you know about this implant?”

  The former Cerberus operative took only an instant to come up to speed. “It’s a memory regulator, Shepard.”

  Karin nodded. “We deduced that it had some function related to the Commander’s memory and personality. Was it used to prime his brain to retain his pre-death memories?”

  “Exactly. Shepard, we had to do a great deal of reconstruction of your brain tissue. We had a fairly complete record of your memories, thanks to Liara’s assistance, but loading those memories back into your rebuilt brain posed a serious problem.”

  “Sorry, brain surgery isn’t one of my skills,” said Shepard. “Can you explain the problem, preferably using small words?”

  “The issue is that brains aren’t digital devices. They’re analog, and they’re also terribly complex. Memories are stored holistically, in the patterns of interconnected neurons, even in the electrochemical states of the neurons themselves. Take a single memory – say, the time you first kissed Irene Stanton when you were fourteen years old . . .”

  Shepard frowned. I had to hide a smile.

  “That memory is stored in an associational network involving many hundreds of neurons. If it’s a particularly vivid memory, it may be stored in several different places, with different associations for each. So years later you see a woman with the same color eyes, or you catch an odor that reminds you of the scent of her hair, or you meet someone with the same first name, and the neurons fire. You remember.”

  “So when the neurons die, their networks get disrupted and the memories get lost.”

  “Yes. It’s possible to scan living brain tissue and recover memory traces, which we can then store digitally. Reading those traces back into another brain, so that it can remember what the first brain remembered, that’s almost impossible. How do you force the living neurons to take up new configurations?”

  “Asari do it all the time,” he objected.

  “Not even asari science can explain how that happens,” said Miranda, rather tartly. “It’s not something we could duplicate, and we couldn’t very well ask Liara to take up residence on Lazarus Station for months on end.”

  “I would have come,” I murmured, but Miranda ignored me.

  “In any case, we found a solution. Use the brain’s own interface syste
m. Memories get imprinted on the brain by way of several specific structures: the amygdala, the hippocampus, and so on.”

  “Right where you put this implant,” Shepard observed.

  “Correct. The implant contains a copy of all the memory traces we recovered from your unreconstructed brain, and from Liara’s donation. While we regenerated your brain, the implant replayed your memories by stimulating the appropriate neural centers. Your new cerebral cortex assimilated the memory traces and imprinted them in long-term storage by the usual biological means, all while you remained in a coma for several months.”

  “So this implant isn’t actually me. More like a backup.”

  “It’s not even that, Shepard. Once you became conscious, it should have shut down. The only reason it’s still there is because it’s safer to leave it in place than to try to remove it surgically from your living brain.”

  “That’s not right,” Karin objected. “It’s been active on several occasions in the past two weeks. On one occasion, we believe it triggered a seizure.”

  Miranda frowned. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

  Shepard leaned forward, giving her a sharp glare. “Clearly it is possible, Miranda, so we should start thinking about why, and how to fix it.”

  “Here’s another data point for you,” I stepped in. “What brought this to our attention was something I observed while Shepard and I were joined. I sensed an echoing effect, as if two of Shepard existed in the link.”

  “Well, that’s clear enough.” Miranda’s expression softened somewhat, as she felt herself on familiar ground. “During asari-human bonding, the asari metacortex comes into synchrony with the human limbic system. Not only would you see the human partner’s existing long-term memories, you would also be aware of new memories currently being laid down by the same neural structures that are tied to the implant. If the implant is active at the time, you would perceive that as a doubling. Memories being recorded in two channels at once, as it were.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why the implant is coming active in the first place,” Shepard complained.

  “We think the activity may be correlated with exposure to indoctrination,” said Karin.

  “Indoc . . .” Miranda’s eyes opened wide with surprise.

  The three of us waited, watching our friend’s image.

  “That has to be it,” she said finally. “Shepard, one feature of the implant is a feedback loop. While you were still in a coma, it constantly queried your organic brain to ensure the core memories it played out had been properly stored. If it found a large enough discrepancy, it would replay the memories again until they were clear. Think of it not as copying memories into your brain, but as training your new brain to carry the right memories.”

  “That feedback never got turned off?”

  “Not explicitly. We simply assumed it would become inactive once your memories, the experiences that formed your personality, were all in place.”

  I saw it then. “What happens if some external force tries to alter his core memories? Tries to change his personality?”

  “Then it’s possible the implant would detect that and try to counteract it.”

  “Is that how indoctrination works?” asked Shepard.

  “It’s certainly part of the effect,” said Karin. “The most obvious symptoms – hallucinations, the experience of hearing voices, and so on – those come later, or under very intense exposure. The case studies I’ve seen suggest that the Reapers first establish control by manipulating the victim’s underlying personality. That suggests the alteration of memories. Miranda, what data rate did you observe from the implant while the Commander was under your care?”

  Karin and Miranda fell into a highly technical discussion, leaving me behind within moments. I exchanged a rueful glance with Shepard, who was even more clearly at sea.

  After a time, he grew impatient and cut off debate. “Miranda, does this suggest I’m somehow immune to indoctrination?”

  “No, Shepard. The implant can only read data back into your organic brain so fast. If you’re exposed to the indoctrination effect at very high intensity, or for a long period, then it can certainly affect you. I think what this means is that the implant will give you some ability to recover from indoctrination, especially if your exposure to the effect is minimized.” Miranda sighed deeply. “I wish I could tell you more. Unfortunately that would require in-depth research, and I just don’t have the time or the resources right now.”

  “That’s all right, Miranda,” said Karin. “You’ve given me plenty to go on.”

  “All right. I’ll stay in touch as best I can. If there’s anything more I can tell you, I will.”

  Shepard leaned forward. “Miranda, are you all right?”

  “More or less. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you in person. The Citadel is too dangerous right now. I heard about the attempted coup.”

  “Yeah. Udina nearly took control, with Kai Leng’s help.”

  “Kai Leng? That slippery bastard’s still alive?”

  “Alive, and right in the middle of all this.”

  “That complicates things. I’ll be on my guard.” Miranda hesitated, and then pushed onward. “I don’t have much time, but you need to know. I learned what happened to my sister. My father found her. Took her back from her adopted family.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Her voice went glacially cold. “If he’s done anything to her, I’ll kill him.”

  “Miranda . . .”

  “That’s my problem to deal with, Shepard. There’s more. I heard a rumor, maybe more, that my father is working on something for the Illusive Man. Something big.”

  Shepard frowned. “You know, we’ve been wondering where Cerberus has gotten such a big army so quickly.”

  “I see what you’re getting at. I don’t know if this is related. My father may have nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, whatever he’s up to, it can’t be good. We have to figure this out.”

  “I agree . . .”

  “Miranda. Come join us on the Normandy. We can protect you, help you work through this.”

  Miranda shook her head in reluctant refusal. “I’m sorry, Shepard. You’ve got your mission, and I don’t think mine would fit. I’m afraid this is something I’ll have to do myself. It’s time I stopped running from him anyway.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. I can’t think straight until I know Ori is safe, anyway. After that, we’ll see.”

  “All right. Anything you need, contact me. I think the same goes for the Shadow Broker.”

  I nodded in wordless support.

  “Thanks. That means a lot.”

  “Be careful, Miranda.”

  “I can’t promise that, Shepard. Could you?”

  Then she turned away, and her image vanished.

  * * *

  12 May 2186, Task Force Aurora Facility/Citadel

  Evening had come before we could get away from the Spectres and return to Garret’s workplace. This time EDI joined us. We unloaded several cases of equipment from the back of the aircar, gathered from Normandy and the Spectre offices.

  Once we finished, Shepard led us directly over to the storage case where the crystal sphere waited.

  “Look,” I said quietly. “It’s active.”

  The sphere shone with iridescent colors, far brighter than I had seen it on our previous visit. I held a hand up to it and felt a vibration, like a low hum too deep to be heard.

  “We need to shield it right away,” said Shepard. “I may have a backup brain, but you don’t.”

  “Based on Dr. Garneau’s data, and using the equipment we brought from Normandy, I should be able to set up a shield to block the artifact’s emissions,” said EDI. “I would advise the two of you to move away from the artifact until I have finished the task.”

  “We can go look for clues as to Ann Bryson’s location,” said Shepard. “Come on, Liara.”

  We searched for som
e time with little result, until I noticed that new messages had come in to Garret’s mail account while we searched for Garneau. “Here, Shepard. Ann must have tried to contact her father in the past few days. If she’s isolated out in the field, she might not have heard what has happened.”

  “Can you play the message?”

  “Just a moment . . .”

  A holographic image appeared: a human female, short and sturdy of build, wearing a conservative haircut and unfashionable clothes. Her dark eyes gleamed with intelligence.

  “Dad. I’m at the dig site in the Pylos Nebula. Project Scarab paid off. I’ve got another artifact like the one Alex found. I think it could be affecting people’s behavior. You need to shield the one in your office, like the Reaper fragment. I tried to warn Alex, but I can’t get through.” She paused for a moment, looking rather frightened. “We’ve had sightings of Reaper scouts here. I think they’re going to find the main site before much longer. I’m heading to our secondary base to grab what research data I can. Talk to you as soon as I get back. Be careful.”

  I shook my head. “Such a tragedy. She couldn’t get through to Garneau, she called here too late for her father, and now the Reapers are pursuing her.”

  “We had better figure out where she is, and get to her before they do. The Pylos Nebula?”

  “I don’t know that cluster. I wish she had said what planet.”

  “Maybe we can figure that out. I think I saw a list of ship charters over here . . .”

  He was right. We soon found that the younger Dr. Bryson had chartered the MSV Icarus for her journey out to the Pylos Nebula. Shepard smiled in triumph as he scanned the ship’s specifications.

  “I don’t see how this helps us,” I complained.

  “That’s because naval architecture isn’t in your skill set, T’Soni,” he teased me. “Look here: enhanced electrostatic discharge cells. That’s unusual for a civilian merchant vessel, unless it’s rigged for deep-space exploration. Ships like this are designed to venture a long way into the wilderness, away from the mass relay network.”