Darkness clung to me like oil.
At first, I wasn't sure I was alive. Everything felt numb. Distant. My body wasn't responding. I wasn't cold or warm. I wasn't breathing. I wasn't even sure I had lungs anymore.
Then the pain hit.
Blinding, roaring, endless. It tore through my spine like lightning and clawed its way into my skull. Every nerve in my body screamed in unison. Muscles locked. My vision pulsed red.
I was awake.
Not by choice.
I lay on a table beneath surgical lights that still buzzed faintly overhead. Tubes slithered from my arms into dead machines. Black fluid clung to my skin like half-cooled tar. The restraints had failed. I broke them without thinking.
I fell to the floor.
Hard.
My knees struck metal. My palms braced against it—but the sensation wasn't right. My hands were too strong. Too stable. Like they weren't mine anymore.
I forced myself to stand, breathing hard, vision swimming.
Where am I?
I stumbled toward a mirrored panel near the wall, dragging myself across the room.
What I saw stopped me cold.
The man in the reflection wasn't the one I remembered.
Same bone structure. Same features. But the skin had changed. There was a faint glow beneath it—subdermal, flickering blue in thin lines. My eyes weren't human anymore. They shimmered, alive with something mechanical.
A hybrid.
No… a Reaper hybrid.
That was when I heard the whisper.
Not from the room.
From inside my mind.
He wakes.
I gritted my teeth and slammed my fist into the wall until the voice stopped. The pain helped. The damage did not.
I staggered to a console, activated the nearest terminal, and began overriding the system with instinct I didn't know I had. The commands came fast. My fingers moved faster.
I accessed the system logs.
Names. Locations. Facility number. Test phase. Host subject data.
And then… I found a file.
A simple one.
Just two words.
hybrid reaper
And beneath it:
STATUS: ACTIVE
The words dropped like ice into my chest.
I knew what this was.
I knew where I was.
This wasn't a nightmare.
This wasn't hell.
This was the Mass Effect universe.
And the Reapers were already moving.
I backed away from the screen slowly, head pounding.
Mass relays. Citadel space. The Protheans. The cycles. The war. The end.
All of it real.
I remembered the names: Saren. Sovereign. Harbinger. Jane Shepard. John Shepard. The Citadel. Omega. Tuchanka. Thessia. Palaven. Earth.
And worse… I remembered how it all ended.
I clenched my fists until my hands trembled.
They brought me here. They changed me. But they made a mistake.
They left my mind intact.
They let me remember.
And I would use that memory to burn everything they built.
The facility was abandoned. Not ruined—just unfinished. Empty labs. Unused holding cells. Dozens of datapads still sealed in crates.
They were planning something.
And I was going to rewrite it.
I converted the entire base into something new—my command center. My forge. My last home.
From that place, I would build what the galaxy needed.
Because this time, I wouldn't beg the galaxy to unite.
This time, I would make sure it did.
Even if it meant becoming the very thing I swore to destroy, especially if I have 13 years to do so.
The Reapers don't win because they're strong.
They win because they make people stop fighting.
I remembered that clearly now. Not just the battles, not just the lost worlds—but the people who changed. Soldiers who turned on their squads. Scientists who sabotaged their work. Leaders who signed their own species' death warrants with blank eyes and hollow voices.
Not puppets.
Slaves.
It wasn't just control. It was conversion. A slow, rot-like erosion of everything that made you who you were.
That was indoctrination.
And it was the real war.
I locked myself in the lower levels of the facility—stripped out old consoles, built biolabs from scavenged equipment. I wasn't a scientist in my past life. Not really.
But I had a memory. Perfect, unwanted memory.
I remembered every time someone lost themselves. I remembered the way Saren changed. The words Benezia said before she was gone. The quiet guilt in Anderson's voice when he admitted he knew something was wrong but didn't know how to stop it.
I also remembered the research logs. The timelines. The tech.
I remembered what not to do.
The first weeks were brutal.
I harvested every known frequency used by Reaper forces—scrubbed extranet messages for unusual modulation, traced stolen code buried in Prothean data leaks. There was no manual. No formula. This was new ground.
But I started with what I knew:
Indoctrination was neurological. It didn't hack you. It sang to you. A frequency embedded in thought, layered in your subconscious until your will crumbled. It altered chemistry. Overstimulated key pathways. Quieted the resistance centers of the brain.
If I could block the signal…
Or burn it out…
I might have a chance.
The first version of the cure was crude.
A biochemical disruptor. Powerful, but unstable. It blocked indoctrination, but at the cost of violent side effects. Hallucinations. Pain. Neurological spikes.
I destroyed it.
Too dangerous. Not clean enough. I wasn't looking for a cure that would save someone by turning them into something worse.
So I started over.
Version two. Three. Four. Five.
Each one better than the last. Each one was tested on grown tissue samples, artificial neural clusters. Still not enough.
I needed more time.
But time was the one thing I didn't have.
Every night I tried to sleep, the whispers came.
Faster.
They are not ready.
You are wasting time.
Let it go. Let them fall.
They knew I was working against them. I could feel it in my bones. Like pressure in the walls of the world itself.
Sometimes I'd wake up gasping, fingernails digging into my palms. Sometimes I wouldn't sleep at all.
The whispers didn't just taunt me.
They knew me.
They used my memories. My doubts.
Every time I reached a breakthrough, they found a way to plant a question in my mind:
Should you even try to save him?
Saren Arterius.
The name came back again and again.
He hadn't fallen yet. He still believed in the Council. Still acted in the name of justice.
But it was only a matter of time. The wrong artifact. The wrong whisper.
I could reach him early. Give him the cure. Change the timeline. Stop the fall before it begins.
But if I did… I wouldn't know where the Reapers were going to strike. I wouldn't know who they'd use. Which planets would burn? Which decisions would unravel the galaxy?
Letting Saren fall was a cruel gift.
Because if I watched him fall again, I'd have a map.
And a target.
But watching it happen—letting it happen—was starting to pull me apart inside.
Some nights, I stood in the biolab alone, staring at version sixteen of the serum, now stable across five major species.
I had done it. The base cure worked.
It wasn't perfect. But it was enough.
If I could get it to the right people… I could buy time. Break the chains before they lock in place.
I whispered aloud to no one, "That's what this is, isn't it?"
Time.
A borrowed clock, ticking down in reverse.
The next morning, I tested a dermal delivery patch on myself—not because I was indoctrinated, but because I needed to know if the serum would reject Reaper tissue.
It didn't.
But it didn't change me either.
I stared into a mirror after applying it. The glow in my veins still pulsed. My eyes still flickered with that cold blue fire.
Whatever I was now… it couldn't be undone.
I could stop others from falling.
But not myself.
Still, I wasn't done.
The cure was real.
And now, I needed an army to carry it.
The next phase would require infrastructure. Scale. Trust.
And that meant one thing:
I needed to start building something bigger than a lab.
Bigger than a dream.
Something the Reapers wouldn't see until it was already too late.