2. Awakening

It was all very dramatic.

Brilliant flashes of light, shards of metal flying off in every direction with one large piece of the hull spinning into the camera complete with dying screams over the comm systems. The Mass Relay hung silently against the nebula backdrop, the glowing blue orb with white in the center staring as the ship limped, venting air and bodies. The screen flashed.

*Vessel Destroyed*

[Rebecca] gritted her teeth and pressed hard on the haptic interface. "God damn it!"

A digital message tagged [Vigil] pinged her. The words typed themselves out in a tiny script, a few small pixels in height at most, in the far upper right corner of her eyesight. Reading it took no effort. Everything was always in clear focus. You Failed To Clear The Mass Relay.

The response was automatic. No shit.

If Aegis was something like the quiet scientist with no social skills that was far too interested in efficiency and number crunching for its own good, Vigil was the military drill sergeant with a personal vendetta. It took her two days to cover the material Prothean students would have learnt over seven years? The Reapers didn't give a shit! Learn faster.

The VI was right on her heels every time she crashed, which was 33—34 times now.

Another impressive explosion. This time the approach vector had been too steep, sending the ship into a corkscrew and getting accelerated past the speed of light into the relay. On the surface, it looked easy. Fly in, play tag with the relay, get shot half way cross the galaxy. The problem lay in the technology used. Faster Than Light travel relied on the Eezo Drive Core lifting all speed limitations mass would have laid on the ship. Thing is, the chunk of Element Zero was constantly being supplied energy but the resulting Mass Effect field was anything but constant.

Sometimes the ship was heavier. Sometimes it was lighter. When the ship gained or lost weight in the middle of a turn, the resulting change in inertia threw everything off. And there was nothing for it but practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. And this was just with one small simulated ship, where the 'random' fluctuations were more or less predictable. Less after she stopped cheating by unconsciously reading into the program. After she graduated past the Mass Relay, then she had to tackle piloting a completly weightless ship traveling faster than light. God forbid she had to switch ships.

Joker was a goddamned genius.

You Continue To Fail Clearing The Mass Relay.

Vigil, I swear to God, if you don't stop pointing out the bloody obvious—

A short notification from [Aegis] popped up in a small red box. The drones require assistance.

She turned off the simulation. Standing up still gave her a tiny thrill and she wiggled bare toes against the cold metal. On my way.

The bunker looked much like the examples of Prothean architecture from the game, and at the same time it didn't. There were no barrier curtains. The carved grooves in the stone-like metal alloy were smooth and swirling, thin wires embedded into them that acted as the lighting. The distinct lack of those cell-like structures made her think that Liara had been excavating a Prothean prison block, or something like it. The haptic interfaces were a pale green, bordering on yellow, springing from rounded metal rectangles or pyramids.

Everything was made out of that alloy, and it was apparent that the concept of an office chair was completely lost on the galactic empire. Furniture was crafted out of blocks of that same metal, for all intents and purposes stationary. No neck rests. No arm rests. However, she did have to give the Protheans the advantage. They didn't actually sit on the blocks. They sat on the small mass effect fields the blocks projected. A space version of memory foam.

Nothing drives the concept of "galactic empire" home like using the super rare Element Zero for chairs. The equivalent of toilets built from solid gold.

There was one similarity between the ruins from the game and the outpost she was in.

Damage.

The ceiling crumbled or caved in, the floor ruptured. Scorch marks and gouges, discarded weaponry. Nearly everything that wasn't attached to the floor was toppled and broken and thebodies. Prothean corpses decomposed from the inside out, creating what looked like a sack of toughened tissue hung on a skeleton. There were only a few of them and in some ways that made it so much worse. She knew where the others ended up. Cybernetic puppets of meat and metal.

Collectors.

The bunker, or more accurately, the facility was extremely large. Each section was capable of housing a few thousand people. Small cities devoted to developing cutting edge medical technology, or ship drives or guns. Vigil informed her that the Balan Outpost was perhaps the most defensible fortress in the Prothean Empire. It was where refugees from the war flocked to, hoping for both a safe haven and the key to victory. And then someone made the mistake of bringing in Reaper artifacts for study. In one swift stroke all of it, the guns and soldiers, the security scans and tests, everything were completely bypassed by indoctrination.

And the rest was history.

She would have loved to explore the place. Every new technology the Protheans had developed was here. But those Reaper artifacts? They were also still here. She had marked the entire section as Avoid At All Costs. She wasn't even going to send the drones. Ever. Right now, her only priority was accessing the power grid and the ship bay.

The ship bay was on the other side of the facility, where the walls ran flush with the cliff side and what used to be an ocean teeming with marine life. The power grid was on the bottom floor. And in the center was a really big hole something tentacled and huge punched through. The small lift drones were personal helpers and ill-equipped to deal with a lot of the wreckage they came across. Clearing rubble? Fine. Rappelling down fifteen floors to unlock the elevator?

Nope.

[Rebecca] kicked a metal chunk over the side and wished she had shoes. She borrowed a Prothean body suit and they were apparently too good for a pair of trainers. Must be the only have two toes thing. Almost seventeen seconds later, she finally heard the tiny plink. The calculation was nearly instant.

"That's a long drop." She looked at the drones. Wide, triangle bobble heads with three fingers and treads for locomotion. Almost cute. They looked back. She looked down. Sighed. "Right."

She idly grabbed a hanging electrical wire jutting out from the crumbling wall. Red lines were drawn, the angles displayed in floating numbers.

Calculating trajectory.

She took a deep breath, the kind where she could almost feel the quiet clicking of a synthetic organ expanding and tore the wire out of the wall. She didn't even feel the strain.

The attack had collapsed the ceilings inwards creating what looked like a giant metal sinkhole, trails of dust from the surface bleeding in. Blocking off the floors below was one of those bent slabs angled outwards towards the center. There were a lot of stray exposed wires and thankfully, none of them were sparking. Fifteen floors. Alright. She could do this.

Fear detected. Disable? Y/N

This was crazy. She was crazy. She was a doctor whose greatest level of exertion was casual Yoga. She kept Fiber One bars in her desk because sometimes she forgot to have lunch, was adopted by a gorgeous brown and black tabby cat and was happily addicted to the internet. She was not the type to vault out into a several hundred foot drop with electrical wire and duct tape. She was not Lara Croft, James Bond, John McClane or bloody fucking Macgyver!

Hysteria detected. Disable? Y/N

Aegis thought she was an AI. Vigil thought she was an AI. But she was a person long before she ever became a string of numbers and that person was…that person was. Past tense. She had to manually follow the logic trail, cataloging every change, every difference. Mounting conclusive evidence. Her mind was frequently getting ahead of her.

She raised a hand in front of her face. Bent each finger against the palm methodically until she felt herself calm down. The skin was very pale, with a light blue tint she wasn't sure organic eyes could detect, a fine mesh of carbon graphene littered with microprocessors just underneath. And deeper still was a simple circulatory network. Blood she didn't even need. Synthetic muscles made out of nanotubes attached to a super alloy frame. Her hair was black, absorbent, hollow and warm. Why now? Why was she thinking about this now?

She thought she was over this. She thought wrong.

She buried the thoughts in the priority queue. It didn't matter if she was over it or not. There was a race of mechanic Cthulu assholes trying to wipe out the entire galaxy.

She only had to take three steps back, a running leap into open air.

Disabling fear subroutine.

The first three seconds in free fall were relaxing. The loose bodysuit fluttered with wind just beginning to whistle in her ears. Letting it end was almost sad.

She hit the end of the slab running. Three steps to clearance. The wire was threaded between her hands. Predictive simulations acted out scenarios. She could make the floor on the other side. She didn't want to make the floor on the other side. One step to clearance. She fell into a slide and dropped off the ledge. Broken floors shot past. Seven. Eight. Nine. She adjusted her angle closer. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

The jutting metal shard split the air in front of her nose before the wire caught. Her joints separated to absorb the stress of arrested momentum. Let go.

She landed with a heavy thump and a swirl of displaced dust.

Fear subroutine enabled.

[Rebecca] blinked. "Well." Some program somewhere was whining that the body could have survived a straight drop. She dropped the wire and ignored it. "That happened."

It was disjointing. She could clearly recall being justifiably terrified. And then she wasn't. And now it was difficult figuring out what she had been scared of in the first place. She shrugged it off. Elevator.

The lights in the walls flickered as she walked through. A hand trailed over the smooth grooves and came away clean. She rubbed her fingers together thoughtfully. There was much less dust and debris than she expected. The bottom floors were almost pristine. The rooms she passed were still intact. Equipment waiting to be operated, samples still preserved for study and in one case, someone had left their computer on. The sick yellow interface hung in the air. It was quiet enough for her to hear her own mind whispering.

It gave her the creeps.

The elevator was a familiar sight. A large circle attached to rails on the side, the rounded pillar indicative of a Prothean control panel sitting in a slight depression in the center. If she recalled correctly, and she knew she did, the panel with the lock was behind the far latch. Looking at it now, with no doors or even rails keep anyone out, it seemed off. In a facility full of indoctrinated Protheans and a Reaper punching holes in the roof, why bother locking the elevator? The only thing locking an elevator did was make it harder for people to go anywhe—

All processes froze in horrified realization.

Locked elevator. The facility had lost power, regained power, computer turned on. Aegis memory banks corrupted, partial functionality restored, signal from dark space, override code. Override code. Override code!

Hysteria detected. Disable? Y/N

The panel was already open. And there hunched against the wall was a dead Collector.

She hoped it was dead.

"Son of a bitch."

AEGIS! WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

The Collector moved.

She moved first.

Weapon detected.

Slammed the head against the wall and planted a knee in the broken mess that was the Collectors legs, reaching for the neural link attached to its arm. Couldn't think, couldn't think, couldn't stop to think—the cord brushed against her fingers just as the Collector recovered, springing forward with an unearthly screech. Its shoulder rammed into her gut with enough force to collapse the synthetic lung, hurtling her through the air. She bounced on the grooved surface of the elevator as klaxons blared in her skull.

Foreign algorithm detected.

Recommending evasive maneuvers, Aegis stated helpfully. She shut it out, in favor of the strangely fleshy clatter a few feet away.

The gun. It had dropped the gun.

They both realized it at the same time. It lunged for the weapon. She didn't.

Her foot shot the gun into the opposite wall hard. It ricocheted, spinning and the Collector came down on her ankle. She wasted no time slamming the heel of the other one right between the eyes. It dug in.

Warning. Intrusion detected.

Cybernetic tendrils seeped out of the Collector, painful pressure flared underneath her skin. "No!" The second kick ruptured one of the yellow eyes, the third cracked the carapace. NO! The Collector shrieked defiantly. The next one caved in its head.

[Rebecca] felt it. Halfway between a pop and a crackle, wire and wet brain tissue. For the next fifty seven seconds, she thought of nothing. A void, empty space. A warm pulse from her ankle dragged her back, her fingernails were digging into her arm. She removed her foot with a metallic squelch, wincing, and turned the Collector over. It was definitely dead this time. She had nearly taken its head off and a gaping wound in its side like it got caught on a hook displayed inert cybernetics.

The pieces that had burrowed underneath her skin glowed blue.

"Is this where you pop out?" She asked it. She was bleeding a deep purple in small trails. "Glow all yellow and assume direct control on my ass?" No response.

Hysteria detected. Disable? Y/N

"Come on!" She screamed suddenly. "Do it! Do it! I'm right fucking here, what are you waiting for? I'm right—" She choked on the words and they echoed into the large space. "I'm here.What do you want from me?"

Nothing.

Multiple requests for access were bouncing off her firewalls. With a sigh, she let the Vis in. Vigil immediately began piggybacking on the visual feed while Aegis displayed rudimentary concern in checking her over. She knew she shouldn't look too much into it. With its memory virtually wiped clean and personality imprint corrupted, it had practically been re-purposed into her personal caretaker. But she still smiled.

Hostile was terminated, Aegis observed. [Rebecca] is contaminated.

Prep the medlab, will you?

Vigil focused her eyesight on the Collector. Abominations. Filth. This Must Not Repeat.

You know it won't she sent back tiredly. All we really need is a head start in constructing the Crucible.

She trudged over to the control panel of the elevator. She sent it up, only managing a faint snort when it turned out to be just as slow as the games had depicted. She felt empty. Distracted. Her mind was working, always, she just couldn't bring herself to pay any attention. She bent her fingers against her palms, hummed Gilbert and Sullivan and did not look at the corpse.

The drones were waiting for the elevator, rolling out onto the platform before it had fully stopped moving. She patted one on its wide head as she passed it, not entirely knowing why and made a detour. She was bleeding. Her other foot was sticky. She needed a shower.

Her borrowed quarters were just as utilitarian looking as the rest of the facility. Chair boxes and desks, a bed that was more metal and eezo than it really had any right to be and the glowing swirls of light scrawled all over the ceiling. She shuffled out of the baggy bodysuit and stepped into what felt like having a bubble bath standing up. She sighed and laid her head against the wall. Purple blood and scraps of metal swirled down the drain.

She imagined her foot crunching through a person's face and hurriedly deleted the image. That wasn't helping. She exited the shower and was dried off instantly. Snagged another bodysuit, this one white, and put it on. She sat on a chair in order to take a good look at what the Collector had done to her ankle, but almost all traces of it had disappeared. The skin had healed over. Just a faint blue light shimmered underneath, fading.

Oh that's not good.

Aegis politely contradicted. Your coding is compatible. Assimilation at estimated 63%.

Vigil was far less sympathetic. Your Chassis Is Not Suited For Combat. She instantly got the impression that what the VI was really saying was 'it's your own damn fault.' And she couldn't exactly disagree. Next project: Combat hardsuit.

[Rebecca] rolled her eyes. Vigil, you think anything less than a dreadnaught is unsuitable. What she needed was a Star Destroyer. Or a Gundam. She wasn't picky.

The Cycle Must End. We Must Not Fail.

Reapers are big. I'm tiny. I get it. That's why we build the Crucible.

Vigil stewed for four microseconds. The Crucible Is Unfinished.

Hysteria detected. Fear detected. Anger detected. Disable? Y/N

WHY

Our Center Of Power Was A Lure. It Is Not Wise To Make Such A Weapon Dependent Upon It.

In other words, some Prothean somewhere decided that attaching a super weapon to a Reaper trap was idiotic. And there was the catch. If she wasn't so horrified, she might have laughed. As it was, she sent Vigil a fourteen gigabit data package filled with expletives.

She sat there on the chair as Vigil grumbled, mass effect fields gently wavering under her weight, and tried to think. To be more specific, she tried to think straight. Thousands of thought trains barely made it out of the station before being blindsided by some completely irrelevant idea (glad I don't have the ability to piss myself—you know I could probably revolutionize the diaper industry—toilets, oh god, I'm actually going to have to fake having to shit, really?) or worse, crashing into a relevant one (a cannon that shoots Thresher Maws?).

It sucked her in, overwhelming. There were snippets of sayings in between, quotes from movies or from friends and family, images and sounds that evoked feelings of hopelessness or fear and she painstakingly waded through it all.

I can't do this. The thoughts quieted but they didn't entirely disappear. I can't.

The weight of several trillion lives was crushing. All she could do was think in circles. No Crucible. No Crucible. There was no saving grace when millions of machines descended upon thegalaxy. Could she finish it by herself? Right, alone? Please. She needed help, she really had to get off this damn planet, this wasn't fair. They'd traded a deus ex machina for what was essen—

Outside Context Problem.

[Rebecca] stiffened. Every stray thought was promptly deleted, everything but that tiny whisper. It was true, wasn't it? Four soft words that changed everything. When in doubt, cheat. They had lost their act of god and stood on the brink of extinction. That was alright, she'd be one for them.

Aegis. The message was sent in slow, thoughtful piecemeal, spaced apart packets. How many fabrication units do you have access to?

Two are operational. A map of the facility with the rooms highlighted in yellow was sent. A third room on the other side of the building flashed red. A third is operational but currently inaccessible.

Your first project. Ill-fitting Prothean bodysuits were probably not in fashion. Neither were the black, white and gold ZAFT Gundam high officer uniforms, but anything that said 'Systems Alliance' seemed like a bad idea. Besides, it wasn't like she was going to be sued for copyright infringement, so why not? It was the first futuristic design she thought of. Your second is to assemble ten more drones. Can I control the drones?

Aegis' answer was shifting her to an empty, methodic mind that was almost depressing to be in. A blank canvas begging for color. She just barely stopped herself from seeping into the cracks in its programming. An experiment for another day. She implanted an image of the Collector and the weapon into its memory banks. Destination: Fabrication unit one.

She left a piece of herself behind, just like in the archives even if it made her extremely uncomfortable. Like she had a rigid phantom finger she was hyper aware of. She stood up; testing her previously injured foot and winced as she sensed the drone attempting to 'stand' as well. Ignoring it, yet not ignoring it was…difficult.

As for the foot if she didn't know better, it was if nothing had ever happened which is almost insidious. I'm not going to just forget your there, you know. She didn't expect a response and she didn't get one. She assigned herself a destination, making very sure it didn't leak to the drone. On to the medlab.

Vigil, let's talk ships.

In spite of mentioning it not even two minutes ago, she was still pleasantly surprised when Vigil immediately brought up a dreadnaught. The distinctive block designs making it look like a tempting massive flying brick of Prothean 'fuck you.' One of these days, she would figure out how to code an eye roll. She had a feeling she was going to need it. Really, Vigil? Perhaps something a bit more maneuverable. She wanted to add "and not so eye catching" but retracted it.

Functionality first.

Vigil seemed to agree with that logic and switched ships without comment.

The second ship was a bit less than three quarters the size of the dreadnaught landing it solidly in battle cruiser territory, but it was also strangely modular looking. Three ships fused into one. It was bizarre and intriguing and she just had to ask. What is that?

Prototype Tactical Command. And then with the slightest hint of reluctance, It Is Untested. [Rebecca] raised her eyebrows and the VI practically blurted out: The Theory Is Sound.

Careful there, she teased. I'm beginning to think you like this ship.

It Was The Personal Project Of Ksad Ishan.

And with that, the amusement died. It was just Vigil's personality imprint, the last gasp of a previous cycle trying to secure its legacy. For a second [Rebecca] simply stopped in the hallway and leaned against the wall.

I will avenge them.

Vigil's reply took her breath away. They Deserve To Be Avenged.

They all did.

She straightened and kept walking. She had an ankle to scan and a flight simulator to beat.

Several minutes later, the diagnosis was not good. The physical pieces of cybernetics had dissolved somehow, spreading through her system as tiny bits of machinery. Nanomachines. And they were replicating, following some program or code Aegis insisted she had but she couldn't find. An image of her shed of skin rotated on the screen, scrawling lines of black and glowing blue creeping up her left side, complete with pulsing nodules. If she were still human, all the blood would have fled from her face. But she wasn't human anymore, was she? That's why she had to deal with shit like this. Assimilation. She was-she was doing this to herself.

At current rate of expansion, estimated two point three standard years to reach this level of contamination.

[Rebecca] averted her eyes. That was—that was plenty of time. She could reach out to the Geth collective, convince the Council to get off their collective asses, tell Shepard everything. And then she'd—eliminate the threat—she didn't know. Something. Plenty of time.

Sadness detected. Disable? Y/N

Thank you, Aegis.

Aegis couldn't recognize the anguish she was broadcasting. Six point two minutes to first project completion.

She laughed lightly. And then got an idea. Harmless fun watching someone else fail repeatedly at flying that damn ship. Hey Aegis, how would you like to pilot a ship?

Programming is insufficient for that functionality.

Come on. She brushed the VI's matrix lightly. Take off is pretty easy, I think I can teach you. Just enough to get in the air, if you want to jump a Relay you're looking at the wrong person.

Aegis was quiet for a moment. Read and Write permissions for User [Rebecca] assigned.

She blinked. Oh. Coding. A.I. What was the defining characteristic of an Artificial Intelligence? Dynamic programming. The connection was made instantly. She didn't have to learn the hard way.

"I'm an idiot."

Aegis, create a backup.

It was an even better idea than she originally thought.

Naturally, once the poor sod failed the simulator by timing out on the response to flight control, she realized that it wouldn't be nearly as easy as she hoped. She reached out into the archives and began to shift through the massive index—there it was, computer programming for primitives—and downloaded it. She left feelers still looking as she absorbed the information. An introduction to the computing language, the syntax, it was a start.

More books streamed through and she put together a simple executable, the feeling not unlike assembling a puzzle in her head.

She passed it to Aegis. And on the screen a message popped up. Hello world

She felt the smug grin stealing over her face and did nothing to stop it. So two words were infantile next to a VI but she had just created a program and had it run by an honest to god Prothean computer. When she thought about it, that bubble of nerdy excitement was probably looong overdue. She was in a game! That was, that was—

Right, back to work.

She took over the simulation, once, driving her mind to cataloging every action and thought sequence while simultaneously absorbing the rest of the material she nabbed from the archives. And with an idle thought, started searching for more: ship repair, logistics, astrophysics, energy science, weapons design and repair, geology, every scrap of potentially useful information. Her thoughts felt impossibly organized and dizzyingly chaotic at once.

The sudden urges to spread further, do more prickled. She indulged a little, sending instructions for an under suit made from the same elastic nanotubes that composed her muscles, project index for the facility and a list of priorities for the analysis of the Collector and its weapon. What material it was made out of, how the biotic organ in the gun was made, how to duplicate the liquid heat sink—

And then crashed the ship.

I can't even feel annoyed anymore. I really can't.

She ran through the action sequence, created a data library of knowledge coded to dispense information when Aegis came across something that puzzled it, a few corrective recursive loops that was essentially 'try not to break something' and it was good to go. She passed it to the VI nervously, hoping she had gotten it all right, that it wasn't going to trigger a crash, it had been through so much already…

Aegis accepted the program and she watched it like an anxious mother seeing her kid skip across a busy interstate highway after a ball.

The VI handled the simulator with the grace of a bull wearing high heels in a china shop, but it did handle it. Mechanically responding to flight control, pausing long enough to reference something it didn't recognize before interacting with it and shakily taking off. She laughed, a wild flare of pride scorching her processors as the digital spaceship listed dangerously and then straightened.

As the ship broke atmosphere, she noticed something peculiar. Aegis wasn't improving. The little mistakes, overcompensating for an increase in mass, leading into turns generating far more inertia than needed, now that she was actually paying attention it was extremely familiar. That was-was that how she flew?

Of course it was, she could have hit herself for being stupid: the program was a direct translation.

Aegis crashed spectacularly on the Relay and she frowned thoughtfully. She tweaked the code, replacing a few numbers and let him try again, this time actively tracking where the problems popped up. And once she found them, fixed them. The simulation ran again. And again. And again. She watched the Relay approach fourteen times.

Wasn't it a sign of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

[Rebecca] took over for the fifteenth run. She kept her attention inwards, making the same changes she had made with Aegis and more, real time shifts in calculations and reactions. It was a distinctly alien feeling, simply because she could feel her thought processes editing, changing, phantom fingers in her head making it so that she literally couldn't think like that anymore.

She imagined this was what it felt like to be indoctrinated, a cold whisper clucking its tongue in mock sympathy.

'See? All better.'

Just because she was the one doing it to herself, didn't make the unease go away.

The Mass Relay loomed on the screen. She banked smoothly into an approach vector, marveling at how much easier everything seemed to be. The large mass effect field reached out to envelope the ship and she fought with it, rumbling feedback in her chair but then, after a moment of hesitation, she eased up on the controls. Joker had always said, he felt the ship, didn't he? There had to be something she had been missing. Some clue, some hint.

She ignored the sensors depicting the ship's changing mass, ignored the little voice screaming too damn close, pull out, pull out! Shut out all those distractions, shut down the anxiety. She leaned back in her chair, felt the ship buck and shudder, marveling at the minute manipulation that made her feel like she was actually on board...It almost felt like the it was being stretched—

"Pilot, you are no longer controlling the ship. Are you alright?"

Her brain immediately leapt to Star Wars: A New Hope with Luke and Death Star, and she snorted. "Fine."

There was a blink-and-you-miss-it bump where the ship almost stopped moving—she could swear the blood pump in her chest skipped a beat as she gently tried to reorient—and blasted past the speed of light. The shimmering blue mass effect field dominated the screen. She let out a slow breath. She did it! She did it! Shediditshediditshedidit, flew through a Mass Relay, that was incredible—it was sloppy as hell, popping out ass backwards and upside down—And then broke into a wide laughing grin.

Success!

Vigil ruined it.

Finally.

She rolled her eyes and closed the simulator. You must be great at parties.

I Do Not Oversee Celebrations.

"Yep," she muttered under her breath as she stood up. "And that would be why."

The analysis grid lit up a soft yellow, a low hum buzzing through the walls as the overhead scanner swept back and forth over the body of the Collector. The gun had gone first, being of smaller size and simple to dissect. Aegis had noted the distinct similarities to Prothean technology and it had also noticed the differences. At first, the presence of organic tissue did not seem practical to the VI. Organic tissue was easily damaged, degraded by radiation and extreme temperatures. But then there was the power source.

Aegis had poked and prodded at the biotic organ with something like curiosity. The simple act of pressing the smaller organ that acted as a trigger seemed to provide an electrical feedback pulse that was then amplified via a small black and glowing blue chip. That pulse stimulated the biotic organ, creating the mass effect acceleration field for the bullets.

The VI remembered User [Rebecca]'s initial desire for biotic capability. It logged its observations.

The door to the lab slid open with a hiss of stale air and [Rebecca] walked in, adjusting the long coat of the uniform she requested.

[Rebecca]: Good job with these.

Aegis carefully filed the message away in an uncorrupted data bank. Analysis has noted similarities with the Prothean tech base.

The mobile platform twisted its mouth in an expression Aegis was unfamiliar with. That's because it used to be a Prothean.

Noted. And it was.

[Rebecca] rounded the grid and tapped a digit against the side. I assume the cybernetics are integral to its function?

Affirmative.

[Rebecca] didn't move for five seconds. Her head tilted. Is it more effective than the previously known Prothean variant?

Affirmative.

The mouth twisted again. Bloody deal with the devil, isn't it?

Aegis took forty three seconds translating the last message as [Rebecca] patiently waited. Once it felt like it had deciphered enough, it responded. It is not harmful. Your coding is compatible.

You know what scares me? I'm actually considering this madness.

Aegis chose that time to launch into a dictation of all the advantages the analysis of the assault rifle had thrown into stark relief. Biotic capability, self-sustaining, self-repairing, superior heat management. The scanner stopped, the diagnostics filtering onto the screen as fast as Aegis could read it. With integration, armor offers increased strength, assisted movement, superior sensory capabilities, self-repairing.

All for the low, low price of your computer soul of course.

Aegis puzzled. Synthetics do not possess souls.

[Rebecca] stiffened…and then overly relaxed into a placid stance. I'm dropping the subject. She bent her digits deliberately, stepping back from the grid. Whatever I'm wearing, it needs to have a memory core and processing power big enough to house you and Vigil. After a short pause, I need a buffer system so nothing will directly interface with me ever again.

Aegis recognized this pattern of instruction, comparing it to the construction of the mobile platform. It settled in, as attentive as the VI could ever be. Other specifications?

Modular. A system for adding and removing components. [Rebecca] took a seat, crossed her legs and scaled her digits on her knee. Something to negate falling damage. Standard ground unit everything else but the sensory array. As for the material?

Her optical sensors traveled the corpse on the table in front of her. Her hands folded, fingers interlaced and 'smiled' a tight, mirthless smile. The following message was tinged with an unidentifiable emotion.

Harvest the Collector.