Do you know what it's like to see the end of the world?
In an instant, everything you've ever known, the petty ambitions and desires of a simple man in a normal universe become insignificant. You're faced with the fact that in the grand scheme of things, you don't matter any more. For many people, that was Shanxi. Where the Turians bulldozed over all the works that we humans, in our arrogance, had thought were more than significant to hold off the predations of the universe, not knowing that there were others out there in the black of space that were just as intelligent and ruthless as we were.
For me, Shanxi was the same for entirely different reasons. Shanxi was where I first looked into the cold, dead eyes of a Turian named Saren and saw the depths of what the alien invaders were capable of. It was where I first saw the freakish abominations constructed of dead turian flesh and interlaced cybernetics hanging off the metallic dragon fangs...and where I saw the Monolith.
I try not to think about that thing much.
Outside that cave, the rest of the colonists were seeing the end of their world, the comfortable, calm life they'd had before, under the guns of alien invaders we'd see as just another political rival years later. But in that cave, I saw the end of everything for the first time. Sleek metal shapes from beyond the stars. Reverberating voices full of godlike arrogance. Alien gods that lurked in the black. Worlds, systems, and clusters set ablaze by the methodical wrath of intelligences beyond anything we'd ever thought to imagine. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that these visions were real. That these things were coming, eventually.
Humanity wasn't prepared for such a thing. That much was clear. In those early days, I thought that all we needed was another wakeup call, like the Turians. But as I grew older, as my work spread further, I began to realize that no matter how much we humans were capable of, we needed more. We needed an edge. I seeded a dozen projects and experiments, searching for something that'd allow that edge. I was, perhaps, unwise in those early days, searching for a silver bullet amongst the garbage of a thousand castoffs. And while Cerberus served its purpose in preventing humanity from growing soft, we were still lacking something. The visions made that obvious. Other races, entire civilizations, had tried to stop what was coming. We weren't any better off than them. We needed something...but what?
Then we stepped right up next to the edge of disaster. I'm not too proud to admit I was rather pleased that it was that bastard Saren that ended up being their first puppet, if only for the poetic justice. But it didn't help the headaches. The dreams. Digging into what Saren had been looking into, the STG files, the Council records of his experiments...that's when I realized my number was already up. The whispers made sense, and I gained perhaps a little sympathy for the turian. After all, he'd realized, far too late, that he was being controlled. I could sympathize, given we seemed to share a common problem.
I don't know these days what it was that exposed me to it. The Monolith might have been Prothean, but that means nothing. All I knew was that I was on borrowed time now. Just like Saren, for all that I could want to save humanity, save the galaxy, I'd be turned just like he was. Eventually. If nothing else, these things, these... Reapers... could wait. Their indoctrination worked to the advantage of the kind of insidious, endless patience only a race of machines could possess.
But despite that, Saren's death and Sovereign's destruction gave me hope. It showed me the edge we were lacking. Shepard. She went up against the vanguard of the Reaper invasion and won by sheer determination, drive, and leadership. She was a one in a million chance. I finally knew what the missing element, the one that could turn the tables, was. It was her. For a while, working to that goal gave me focus. It dampened the voices just like it bolstered my own resolve.
Then she died.
That hope going away almost led to despair, but I knew...knew that that would be the final straw. The minute I gave up entirely, I'd become Saren, a puppet trying desperately to curry favor to salvage what small concessions I could get from a race that possessed neither pity nor generosity. Even if the Reapers and their Collector pawns had killed Shepard, I wasn't willing to let it end at that. Something that magnificent couldn't be snuffed out so easily.
Cerberus waned in those days. The widespread operations were a thing of the past as I moved more and more assets to the central project. Lazarus would bring her back, and I'd be ready when it did, to give her what she needed to save us all. While our reputation for omniscience and espionage remained, I wonder if the Alliance or the Council ever suspected they could have smashed the modern Cerberus as easy as stepping on a bug, after the reorganization. Lazarus was a hole that simply demanded more resources the longer it went on. But I was confident it would pay off.
The whispers increased in those days. They were too active, too responsive, for me to assume they were merely the passive remnants of an artifact I hadn't seen in decades. As much as Sovereign had declared itself the sole vanguard of its species, I knew there had to be another directly involving itself in our affairs. It talked whenever it was quiet. Said that defiance was pointless. That our hope had been smashed. Our savior slain. But I shut that line of reasoning down when we brought her back.
She didn't trust me, then. No blaming her, given what I'd done in the past. But there was no helping it. The bets had been made, and so now I just had to roll the dice, putting everything on her. To stop the Collectors. To stop the Reapers.
To stop me, if these whispers didn't stop growing louder.
The plan went mostly smoothly, but it was after Horizon that I realized the whispers had gone silent. I thought I'd gained a reprieve, but whatever alien intelligence was behind them had simply decided to be more subtle. My judgment, my plans...were becoming unreliable. Horizon had been a gambit that was mostly sound, and it had drawn the Collectors out, no question. But it had soured the trust between myself and Shepard. I should have seen that coming, known to consult with her, but it had just seemed so logical to keep it to myself for the sake of "security".
The Collector cruiser was when they truly played their hand. It was such an obvious trap, yet I had Shepard walk right into it. As if these things hadn't proven they could be dangerously subtle already, and dedicated to eliminating her. But I was so sure that we'd find what we needed in there. The instinct that should've warned me didn't. The whispers had stopped, but so had the voices I'd learned to trust, replaced by ones that I shouldn't. Shepard didn't take that mission's payoff well, and I knew that it was the only way to ensure her command wasn't jeopardized. If playing the obvious villain made her trust me less, made my suspect judgment less reliable in her eyes, then I could handle it. Better she not trust me so I couldn't stab her in the back at a crucial moment.
As Shepard assembled her team, though, I left Cerberus to its own devices. It was practically tuned to support her, at this point. With or without me. So I took what solace I could in shallow, selfish pleasures. The finest drinks and foods. The finest female company in the galaxy. I could have had this all much earlier, but I'd been too driven. Now, staring down the end of my ability to appreciate it, to think of anything but the Reapers' goals, I was determined not to waste the time. When Shepard's bullet eventually came for me, I'd go with no regrets.
The Reaper was a calculated risk. I'd had it handy for some time, but EDI's discovery of the need for an IFF for the Omega Relay pushed it forward in priority. I was no fool. We'd lost contact with the crew there years ago, contact sealed off on my order. I knew what had likely happened to the teams left inside. But the IFF was essential...so I sent Shepard in. I gambled that in a contest between her and the dead hulk, however potent still, she'd come out on top. And she did.
After all of that, the final objective was an anti-climax. If Shepard could succeed against everything else, in spite of my own growing unreliability, she could triumph over the Collectors with ease. The voices seemed to grasp that I knew they were there, waiting now. They're growing louder, more demanding. They desire nothing but my absolute obedience, because the thing behind them has realized that it can't trust its puppet anymore.
I know I won't be able to resist for much longer, so I rant and rave as Shepard expects me to. The indoctrination in that base would corrupt anyone that came near it. It's a cancer cell that needs to be expunged, whatever technological advantages it would convey. And she does exactly what I expect. To deny me, she sets the entire thing to blow. I resist the urge to smile, lest it give away the act. Miranda goes with her, and I feel like cheering. She defies me, and I know that, regardless of those haunting voices, I've won. Cerberus has someone who will be able to take over when I'm removed from play. The poisoned well that the Reapers left behind is gone. And Shepard's proved that she's what this galaxy needs to stand against the Reapers when they realize that subterfuge and subversion is no longer an option.
I lasted long enough. Even if the Reaper whispering in my mind succeeds and I cease to be who I am, it doesn't matter anymore. They eliminated Shepard and I brought her back, made her who we needed her to be. And now she doesn't need me. Now she just has one last debt to pay off, to make us even. I gave her her life back, and now she can give me back my freedom.
Come and find me, Shepard. Some part of me will welcome you when you do.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
In an instant, everything you've ever known, the petty ambitions and desires of a simple man in a normal universe become insignificant. You're faced with the fact that in the grand scheme of things, you don't matter any more. For many people, that was Shanxi. Where the Turians bulldozed over all the works that we humans, in our arrogance, had thought were more than significant to hold off the predations of the universe, not knowing that there were others out there in the black of space that were just as intelligent and ruthless as we were.
For me, Shanxi was the same for entirely different reasons. Shanxi was where I first looked into the cold, dead eyes of a Turian named Saren and saw the depths of what the alien invaders were capable of. It was where I first saw the freakish abominations constructed of dead turian flesh and interlaced cybernetics hanging off the metallic dragon fangs...and where I saw the Monolith.
I try not to think about that thing much.
Outside that cave, the rest of the colonists were seeing the end of their world, the comfortable, calm life they'd had before, under the guns of alien invaders we'd see as just another political rival years later. But in that cave, I saw the end of everything for the first time. Sleek metal shapes from beyond the stars. Reverberating voices full of godlike arrogance. Alien gods that lurked in the black. Worlds, systems, and clusters set ablaze by the methodical wrath of intelligences beyond anything we'd ever thought to imagine. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that these visions were real. That these things were coming, eventually.
Humanity wasn't prepared for such a thing. That much was clear. In those early days, I thought that all we needed was another wakeup call, like the Turians. But as I grew older, as my work spread further, I began to realize that no matter how much we humans were capable of, we needed more. We needed an edge. I seeded a dozen projects and experiments, searching for something that'd allow that edge. I was, perhaps, unwise in those early days, searching for a silver bullet amongst the garbage of a thousand castoffs. And while Cerberus served its purpose in preventing humanity from growing soft, we were still lacking something. The visions made that obvious. Other races, entire civilizations, had tried to stop what was coming. We weren't any better off than them. We needed something...but what?
Then we stepped right up next to the edge of disaster. I'm not too proud to admit I was rather pleased that it was that bastard Saren that ended up being their first puppet, if only for the poetic justice. But it didn't help the headaches. The dreams. Digging into what Saren had been looking into, the STG files, the Council records of his experiments...that's when I realized my number was already up. The whispers made sense, and I gained perhaps a little sympathy for the turian. After all, he'd realized, far too late, that he was being controlled. I could sympathize, given we seemed to share a common problem.
I don't know these days what it was that exposed me to it. The Monolith might have been Prothean, but that means nothing. All I knew was that I was on borrowed time now. Just like Saren, for all that I could want to save humanity, save the galaxy, I'd be turned just like he was. Eventually. If nothing else, these things, these... Reapers... could wait. Their indoctrination worked to the advantage of the kind of insidious, endless patience only a race of machines could possess.
But despite that, Saren's death and Sovereign's destruction gave me hope. It showed me the edge we were lacking. Shepard. She went up against the vanguard of the Reaper invasion and won by sheer determination, drive, and leadership. She was a one in a million chance. I finally knew what the missing element, the one that could turn the tables, was. It was her. For a while, working to that goal gave me focus. It dampened the voices just like it bolstered my own resolve.
Then she died.
That hope going away almost led to despair, but I knew...knew that that would be the final straw. The minute I gave up entirely, I'd become Saren, a puppet trying desperately to curry favor to salvage what small concessions I could get from a race that possessed neither pity nor generosity. Even if the Reapers and their Collector pawns had killed Shepard, I wasn't willing to let it end at that. Something that magnificent couldn't be snuffed out so easily.
Cerberus waned in those days. The widespread operations were a thing of the past as I moved more and more assets to the central project. Lazarus would bring her back, and I'd be ready when it did, to give her what she needed to save us all. While our reputation for omniscience and espionage remained, I wonder if the Alliance or the Council ever suspected they could have smashed the modern Cerberus as easy as stepping on a bug, after the reorganization. Lazarus was a hole that simply demanded more resources the longer it went on. But I was confident it would pay off.
The whispers increased in those days. They were too active, too responsive, for me to assume they were merely the passive remnants of an artifact I hadn't seen in decades. As much as Sovereign had declared itself the sole vanguard of its species, I knew there had to be another directly involving itself in our affairs. It talked whenever it was quiet. Said that defiance was pointless. That our hope had been smashed. Our savior slain. But I shut that line of reasoning down when we brought her back.
She didn't trust me, then. No blaming her, given what I'd done in the past. But there was no helping it. The bets had been made, and so now I just had to roll the dice, putting everything on her. To stop the Collectors. To stop the Reapers.
To stop me, if these whispers didn't stop growing louder.
The plan went mostly smoothly, but it was after Horizon that I realized the whispers had gone silent. I thought I'd gained a reprieve, but whatever alien intelligence was behind them had simply decided to be more subtle. My judgment, my plans...were becoming unreliable. Horizon had been a gambit that was mostly sound, and it had drawn the Collectors out, no question. But it had soured the trust between myself and Shepard. I should have seen that coming, known to consult with her, but it had just seemed so logical to keep it to myself for the sake of "security".
The Collector cruiser was when they truly played their hand. It was such an obvious trap, yet I had Shepard walk right into it. As if these things hadn't proven they could be dangerously subtle already, and dedicated to eliminating her. But I was so sure that we'd find what we needed in there. The instinct that should've warned me didn't. The whispers had stopped, but so had the voices I'd learned to trust, replaced by ones that I shouldn't. Shepard didn't take that mission's payoff well, and I knew that it was the only way to ensure her command wasn't jeopardized. If playing the obvious villain made her trust me less, made my suspect judgment less reliable in her eyes, then I could handle it. Better she not trust me so I couldn't stab her in the back at a crucial moment.
As Shepard assembled her team, though, I left Cerberus to its own devices. It was practically tuned to support her, at this point. With or without me. So I took what solace I could in shallow, selfish pleasures. The finest drinks and foods. The finest female company in the galaxy. I could have had this all much earlier, but I'd been too driven. Now, staring down the end of my ability to appreciate it, to think of anything but the Reapers' goals, I was determined not to waste the time. When Shepard's bullet eventually came for me, I'd go with no regrets.
The Reaper was a calculated risk. I'd had it handy for some time, but EDI's discovery of the need for an IFF for the Omega Relay pushed it forward in priority. I was no fool. We'd lost contact with the crew there years ago, contact sealed off on my order. I knew what had likely happened to the teams left inside. But the IFF was essential...so I sent Shepard in. I gambled that in a contest between her and the dead hulk, however potent still, she'd come out on top. And she did.
After all of that, the final objective was an anti-climax. If Shepard could succeed against everything else, in spite of my own growing unreliability, she could triumph over the Collectors with ease. The voices seemed to grasp that I knew they were there, waiting now. They're growing louder, more demanding. They desire nothing but my absolute obedience, because the thing behind them has realized that it can't trust its puppet anymore.
I know I won't be able to resist for much longer, so I rant and rave as Shepard expects me to. The indoctrination in that base would corrupt anyone that came near it. It's a cancer cell that needs to be expunged, whatever technological advantages it would convey. And she does exactly what I expect. To deny me, she sets the entire thing to blow. I resist the urge to smile, lest it give away the act. Miranda goes with her, and I feel like cheering. She defies me, and I know that, regardless of those haunting voices, I've won. Cerberus has someone who will be able to take over when I'm removed from play. The poisoned well that the Reapers left behind is gone. And Shepard's proved that she's what this galaxy needs to stand against the Reapers when they realize that subterfuge and subversion is no longer an option.
I lasted long enough. Even if the Reaper whispering in my mind succeeds and I cease to be who I am, it doesn't matter anymore. They eliminated Shepard and I brought her back, made her who we needed her to be. And now she doesn't need me. Now she just has one last debt to pay off, to make us even. I gave her her life back, and now she can give me back my freedom.
Come and find me, Shepard. Some part of me will welcome you when you do.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."
