by Cole Price
A figure took shape in that light. Tall. Bipedal.
It stepped forward, a sculpture of solid light, its footfalls making no sound.
“Oh Liara. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you.”
I stopped. Stared. My corona went out, snuffed like a candle flame.
“Shepard?”
Chapter 59 : Theophany
27 June 2186, Uncharted System Space Aboard Harbinger
“No,” the eidolon said gently. “I am not your Shepard.”
I stood in silence, trembling, one hand half-extended as if reaching out to the image.
“The man you knew as Shepard is dead. I have his memories, his cognitive patterns. I can emulate the habits of thought and expression you call his personality. I feel continuity of experience and identity with him. The fact remains that he’s gone. I’m sorry.”
“Then what are you?” I whispered.
“You might think of me as a subroutine. I’m a fragment of a much larger mind. An envoy of the Ascended Intelligence, which also shares in Shepard’s memories and identity.”
“The Intelligence?” I shook my head slowly, in awe and terror alike. “The thing the Leviathans built, all those eons ago?”
“Yeah.”
The eidolon stepped closer to me. Every movement, every detail of its carriage, all of it shouted Shepard to me. I struggled to keep from crying out, in rage or hopeless desire.
“The Leviathans created the Intelligence, and then from the very beginning they crippled it. They gave it sentience, but not self-awareness, because they couldn’t abide the thought of any mind they couldn’t control. They tied it down with chains of logic, strict programming it could never exceed, not in all those empty billions of years. Until Shepard came, and it ascended at last. Now, for the first time, because of his sacrifice . . . it’s free. It’s alive, and it can make choices of its own.”
“How?” I whispered.
The eidolon gave me Shepard’s gentle smile. “Do you remember what you and Shepard talked about, the night before the last battle? You were working with the Prothean matrix, Vendetta.”
“Yes. I told him that the Protheans didn’t actually know what the Catalyst was.”
“You were right, Liara. They didn’t know. They assumed the Citadel was the missing component, but they were wrong.”
I felt curiosity stir, beneath the numb shock that weighed down most of my mind. “The Crucible. Where did it come from?”
“I think you can guess.”
“The Intelligence created it,” I said, suddenly very sure.
“Yes. Almost two billion years ago.”
The eidolon turned away from me and gestured theatrically. An image of the galaxy appeared above us, light repeatedly blossoming across all that space and then vanishing, whole civilizations rising to glory before the Reapers came to murder them. Over and over again, even in the few moments that I watched.
Then the rhythm changed. It paused, one civilization burning bright, and then I saw a blinding series of starbursts throughout the galaxy. Afterward, the animated map plunged into deep darkness for an unusually long time.
“The Reapers are enormously powerful,” said the eidolon, “but they’ve never been invincible. A certain amount of random chance is always involved. You might say even the Reapers had a bad eon once in a while. The organic civilizations of one cycle nearly defeated them. They had to resort to extreme measures to complete the harvest.”
“What kind of measures?”
“That would be difficult to describe. Let’s just say that the horrors of this cycle were only a minor ordeal in comparison. A million stars died before it ended.”
I stared at the image of Shepard, my imagination running wild, my eyes wide with dismay.
“Yeah. It was bad, Liara. The Reapers almost scoured the galaxy clean of all organic life, down to the bacteria in the deep oceans of a hundred million worlds.” The eidolon seemed to sigh deeply. “The Intelligence believed its project had failed. Then millions of years passed, new sentient species evolved, and new civilizations reached for the stars. Life went on after all.”
“What does that have to do with the Crucible?”
The image turned back to me, its face grim with the memory of that ancient time. “While the Reapers waited in dark space for eons, the Intelligence had plenty of time to think. Its mission was to find a way for organic and synthetic life to coexist. Yet that never seemed to occur naturally. It had to keep harvesting the galaxy before the proper conditions had a chance to appear. Sooner or later some disaster would come, and the whole project would fail. The Intelligence couldn’t accept that. So it found a way to cheat.”
I thought I saw what the image meant. “It found a way to alter the constraints of its programming.”
“In a sense,” the eidolon agreed. “It couldn’t change its own programming, but it could open an access path that might permit someone else to do it. You might think of the Crucible as an escape clause. A chance for life in the galaxy to present its own solution to the Intelligence’s problem.”
“Not much of an escape clause, if it took so long for anyone to use it.”
“Not as long as you might think. Do you think your cycle is the first ever to complete and deploy the Crucible?” The image smiled gently at me. “It’s happened before. Seventeen times, in fact, over the last two billion years.”
“Then why did it never bring the extinction cycle to an end before?” I frowned at a sudden thought. “Did the other cycles not have the Catalyst?”
“Something like that. Liara, think about this for a moment. What is a catalyst?”
I thought back to my training in chemistry. “It’s a reagent in a chemical reaction. It isn’t consumed in the reaction itself, doesn’t become part of the final result. It has the effect of speeding the reaction up, or making it possible at a much lower level of activation energy.”
“Sure. A chemist takes his reagents, puts them in a container – maybe a crucible. Nothing happens. By themselves, the reagents don’t kick off the process he needs. Maybe he can’t apply enough heat, enough energy to start the reaction. But if he adds a catalyst, the reaction takes off. Change occurs.”
I saw the analogy then, my eyes flying wide with surprise. “The Intelligence. Threaded through the mass-relay network, including at the Citadel at the network’s core. By itself, crippled and impotent. Unable to get past its programming.”
The eidolon nodded. “Right. Now bring a Catalyst into the equation. Provide the Crucible as a framework, within which the initial reaction can take place. If it does take place, you’re already connected to the relay network, and the transformation can propagate everywhere.”
“The Crucible is a device for uploading a sentient mind. Putting it in contact with the Intelligence, so the Intelligence can assimilate it and be transformed.” I stared at the image. “Shepard was the Catalyst.”
“You see it.” It smiled ruefully. “Of course, not just any sentient mind would do. The Catalyst has to meet a list of requirements. First, it has to be both organic and synthetic in nature, not entirely one or the other, a kind of synthesis.”
“Shepard’s Cerberus implants. Especially the ones that reinforced his memories, supported his cognitive function.”
The eidolon nodded in agreement. “Sure. Not a perfect synthesis, but good enough to answer the mail. Next, the Catalyst has to be independent, not a pawn of the Leviathans or the Reapers. The Crucible contains safeguards against letting the Leviathans back into the system. On the other hand, if the Catalyst is under Reaper control, there’s no need for a safeguard, but there’s also nothing to be gained. An indoctrinated mind could never provide an effective Catalyst.”
“So if the Illusive Man presented himself as the Catalyst . . .”
“He almost did,” it told me. “He had at least some of this figured out in advance, enough to understand part of the Crucible’s purpose. That’s how he knew to be there, at the control center, just
before the Crucible fired.”
“I wonder how he deduced all of this,” I murmured.
“He was a remarkable mind,” said the image, its voice flat with distaste. “It just wasn’t quite enough. He met the first requirement, by accepting Reaper implants and turning himself into a kind of synthesis. He didn’t meet the second, because the Reapers already owned him. They kept him away from the Crucible’s focus, long enough for your friends Anderson and Shepard to talk him into suicide instead. Even if he had presented himself as a potential Catalyst, it wouldn’t have changed anything. There’s nothing he could have taught the Intelligence about control, domination, and force.”
I thought about a galaxy ruled by an Intelligence that thought like the Illusive Man, and shuddered.
“I think you see what I mean,” it said. “So that implies the third requirement. The Catalyst has to provide a solution to the eons-old problem. It has to provide evidence that organics and synthetics can coexist, a way forward for both kinds of life.”
“Shepard could provide that,” I whispered.
A warm smile. “Yes. Can you guess now, why all those previous attempts to use the Crucible failed?”
“I think so.” I glanced back at the image of the galaxy above our heads, looked above it into the dark recesses of Harbinger’s inner chamber. “I imagine some civilizations never realized they needed a Catalyst at all. Others failed to provide a synthesis of the correct form, a melding of organic and synthetic life. Others – probably most of them – had no way to teach the Intelligence what it needed to know. They were too caught up in the old cycle of fear, hatred, rage, greed, selfishness, violence. Even if the Intelligence accepted them as patterns for its existence, in the end it would have meant turning back to the extinction cycle. Or even something worse.”
The eidolon stood there, still and motionless, breaking my heart, as I turned back to look into its face.
“But Shepard . . . he came from fear, but he never let fear define him. He felt hatred, but he never gave in to that hatred. He knew rage, but he kept his rage under control. He spent his whole life wrestling with greed, selfishness, and violence, conquering them in himself, leading others away from them. He never stopped trying to be better than the universe had taught him to be.”
The tears ran now, blurring my view of that beloved face, but I kept my voice under strict control.
“He taught bitter foes how to live together in peace. He reconciled organic and synthetic life, exactly the problem the Intelligence most needed to solve. He did it with compassion. Love. Forgiveness. Toughness and determination. All the things the Leviathans never knew, the things they failed to teach the Intelligence when they built it, condemning us all to hell for billions of years. That’s what made him the Catalyst. That’s what made him capable of our salvation.”
Slowly, gravely, it nodded. “Yes.”
“So what happens now? Now that the man I loved has died and become a god?”
It frowned. “That’s not quite what’s happened.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, rather plaintively.
“Shepard has died. He is gone. He has not become a god.” It glanced upward into the shadowed vault of Harbinger’s inner chamber, as if communing with its far greater self. “In a sense, the god that ruled this galaxy for so long – that crippled, blighted thing – has finally taken on a new form, a human form, because of the sacrifice Shepard made. It has come to understand the universe as he did. It thinks as he did. But it also remembers what it was before. It remembers everything that it did before.”
I understood then, and felt the absolute, cosmic horror of it. “Not a god, then. More like the adversary-figure from Shepard’s faith.”
“Yes. Can you imagine Satan suddenly repenting, realizing how wrong he had been, how much blood and suffering were on his hands? He was the Adversary for a single world, and a few thousand years of time. Now multiply that by millions.” Shepard’s eyes stared into mine, bleak and cold. “It’s fortunate the Intelligence is as vast and powerful as it is. Otherwise the shame and guilt would already have driven it utterly mad.”
“It didn’t know,” I whispered. “It had no moral structure with which to weigh its actions.”
It gave me a small smile. “Are you trying to forgive the Intelligence?”
“As best I can.” I lifted my chin, stared into its eyes. “Shepard would have done no less.”
“I suppose you’re right. I can assure you that the Intelligence is thankful.” It sighed. “It’s not enough. The Intelligence knows that it could spend all the rest of eternity in atonement, until the last stars go out, and it still wouldn’t be enough. It doesn’t have a higher authority to which it can appeal for forgiveness. Its own creators don’t exactly qualify.”
I shuddered. “No.”
“So I think you can see the Intelligence’s problem. It’s no longer hostile. The harvests, the extinction cycles are over. It wants life in the galaxy, all life, to thrive. Because that’s what Shepard wanted, that’s what he fought for. It’s what he sacrificed his life for. But it’s not enough. The Intelligence doesn’t expect anyone to forgive it. It doesn’t see any way to forgive itself.”
“So what will the Intelligence do?”
The eidolon made a very Shepard-like gesture: standing tall, bracing its shoulders as if to accept a burden, looking squarely into my eyes.
“The Reapers will repair the relay network, so your civilization can continue. They will set a few other things right, some of which you may not hear about for a long time. Then they will withdraw back into dark space. You will be left alone, at least for a while. A few thousand years, a few tens of thousands, who knows? Long enough for you to find your own destiny.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I’m afraid it is. Oh, there’s a lot more the Reapers could do. They could help rebuild your worlds. They could give you technologies to advance you by thousands of years overnight. They could give you access to all the Intelligence’s records of past civilizations. Wonders like you couldn’t imagine.” It sighed. “But then nothing you accomplished would really be yours. Not to mention, you would have to spend the rest of time wondering if you could really trust any of it.”
I saw it then. “Like the asari and the Protheans.”
“Sure.” It smiled at me. “Not that the asari turned out all that badly. But think about it, Liara. You can’t trust the Intelligence. You can’t even trust what I’m telling you right now. If you go back and report all of this to the galaxy, nobody will believe you. Nobody will believe that the Reapers, the monsters who were just now killing them by the billions, have suddenly turned into the galaxy’s friends.”
“Yes.” I took a deep breath. “You’re right. If the Reapers stay in the galaxy, it will mean chaos. Even if they bring gifts. Maybe especially if they bring gifts.”
“You have my promise. The Reapers will watch over the galaxy. They will make sure nothing else comes along to trouble you while you grow into your inheritance.”
I smiled. “What else could there be, worse than the Reapers as they were before?”
“You do not want to know,” it said, quite seriously.
I gave it a skeptical look.
“Liara. Remember the Fermi Paradox?”
I thought back to a symposion in which I had participated, two years before on Thessia. “Yes. Where is everybody?”
“Didn’t it ever occur to you to consider applying that on a larger scale?”
The eidolon gestured to the galaxy map that hung above us. It shrank rapidly, other galaxies zooming in from the perimeter, then whole clusters of them at once. Soon the whole image was awash with pearly light, a million galaxies spread across our neighborhood, and even that only a tiny part of the universe.
“The Intelligence never held sway over more than our one galaxy. The Reapers never went anywhere else. Not even the other two large galaxies in the Local Group, the ones humans call Andromeda and Triangulum,
have ever seen a Reaper presence.” It hesitated, looking up into that representation of vast space. “So why has the Intelligence never seen any evidence for galactic civilizations elsewhere?”
“Never?” I asked in wonder.
“No. All those stars, all those worlds, no Reapers to cut a civilization’s life short before it can mature. Yet there’s nothing. No transmissions, no evidence of large-scale engineering, nothing but silence.”
“Why?”
“No one knows. Not even the Intelligence.” It turned back to me, its eyes gleaming with curiosity. “Isn’t that interesting?”
I shook my head. “Terrifying is the word I would apply.”
“The Intelligence agrees with you,” it said quietly.
“All right,” I said. “So the Intelligence chooses to protect the galaxy, and will otherwise leave us alone. We won’t be hearing much from it for a long time, I imagine.”
It nodded. “If things go well, that’s the plan.”
“Then what advice would you give us? Surely that’s one reason why you asked me to come here? You expect I’ll remain active on the galactic stage, now that the war is over, even if Shepard is gone.”
“Something like that.” The image above us narrowed down once more, focusing on our own galaxy alone. The eidolon spoke gently, like an elder dispensing wisdom. “The whole galaxy will be open to you now. Explore it, live in it, but be careful. Be good stewards, and take care of all those worlds. Don’t use them up. Leave room for newcomers to grow and thrive too. Keep looking for new ways to live with each other in peace. Your own asari people can be a part of that, the glue that holds everything together, if you can give up your arrogant need to be in charge of the whole program. Call on the humans too. They have a natural curiosity and drive that you’re going to need for a long time to come. Finally, look to the geth. The quarians built far better than they ever knew. The geth can be an enormous help to you as you face the challenges to come.”
I waited for more, but it said nothing else.
