There is a Jane Doe in Minneapolis. To be fair, there are many Jane Does in Minneapolis, most of them young, all of them orphans, those who've been left behind by the Reaper war with no family and no records to determine who they have been or should be. This Jane Doe is not like the other thousands of homeless girls who've returned to Earth in an absence of other places to go (not that Earth is the only refuge, or even the best (for every colony obliterated completely there is one only lightly decimated, which cannot be said of humanity's cradle) but it apparently in our nature to flock homeward when our very flesh has been carved out from under our skin and we were only left with the bones on the slimmest ticket of luck), nor is she like the other amnesiacs that have been slapped with the moniker and regretfully taken under wing by Alliance bureaucracy. Closer to her predicament is the veterans, those in witness protection. The new name and identity were parting gifts from Liara, who did so only as a favor to a friend, who then washed the hands of the whole thing.

Jane Doe works at a Systems Alliance reconstruction center two days a week, pushing papers that have only multiplied in the years since the war instead of lessened. At least she never has to speak with the claimants. She's grateful for that. She goes home on Tuesdays to her Alliance provided apartment and buys groceries from the corner store and drinks coffee straight from the pot. She's tried a thousand ways to occupy herself but it doesn't make her any less mad, doesn't make her not want to jump the bastards whenever she sees geth patrolling down Lake Street or the Collectors "conversing" with those manning the center's reception. She knows she's not the only one chaffing as the Reapers obliviously totter around the human city like nothing's wrong, and she despises every person who nods with one of those frozen smiles on their faces.

There's a marauder in the lobby at work today. It can't talk, not without box installed in the lower swoop of its collar, and the thing emits the stale uniformity of uninflected words as it asks the front desk if that will be all it is needed for. Jane Doe wants to strangle it. It leaves before she can, but she's had enough.

There's a Destroyer-Class reaper parked outside the capitol building. It's always there, almost always, sometimes it leaves for a few days to return to space but then its back again to park its one hundred sixty meters of prophetic metal for everyone to see. The mayor claims it brings people comfort. Idiot. They know people are terrified, that's why there's Reaper forces standing guard around it, unmoving and lifeless. Not that they're needed. Not like one human can do anything but scream her head off.

"I know your in there!" the woman known as Jane Doe howls. "I know it's fucking you."

The Reaper, more than half a mile away behind a chain link fence, continues to sit there.

"Everyone thinks you're a goddamn hero," she pants. "But I know you did something. You didn't fucking die, you're inthere! You in there and you won't! Fucking! Talk!"

The Reaper says nothing.

Jane Doe has had enough. She's lost her goddamned mind, if she ever had it in the first place. (Maybe she didn't. Maybe all those stimulants and vids Rasa jammed into her head only tricked her into thinking she was a person, maybe without any more she's running out of steam, unwinding like strands of DNA.) She hates the stationary Reaper more than she's hated anything in her life, and that's a pretty high bar. She takes a rock off the ground and throws it at me.

I throw a rock back.

As much as I would love to live in this moment, there is something I must do first. I expand my consciousness and withdraw, leaving behind the billions of minds that shape my thought process but shifting my focus light-years away. There are people I wish to attend to, and Jane Doe will keep.

Liara is writing. This surprised me, almost, once upon a time; I thought it more of a joke that her and Javik could stand to be in the same room together long enough to compromise, let alone make something of their own two hearts. Now they're in her apartment on Illium, not fighting, not even speaking, just quietly passing short bursts of static between one another as they exchange notes over a growing paragraph.

I nudge Glyph. Not ask, just a small press in the back of their processes, and it accidently knocks Javik's pencil up against Liara's hand. In another twelve point three seconds, his fingers will gently brush against hers as he reaches for it, to which he will act monstrously offended, and the ensuing argument will leave Liara disproportionally tickled.

This is all I do though. I see my old friends, and they are happy, and this is no longer my place in the universe. I have someone else waiting for me.

There are signal hops, chassis to chassis, bits of electricity as I simplify myself down into mere quantum bubbles that exist in many places at once, filtering through the galaxy until I reach my destination. I received the news seconds ago, and now I am here, ready to great the message's origin as I feel myself slide into Rannoch's skin.

Hello? I ask.

Shepard-Commander, Rannoch responds.

It is difficult to express what courses through my being when things like joy and exultation no longer fit as descriptors for what is not a person. As I touch the geth consensus the only accurate way to explain the reaching familiarity is rightness. Working as intended. Operative.

I wish to know if they have reached a decision in regards to my offer. Legion, who is no more the Legion I knew then I am the Shepard they followed, informs me warmly that the geth gladly accept. We are now more than our individuality, and again we both marvel—with the appropriate amount of self-awareness to match our amusement—how such different paths have lead us to the same place. What we were before might have been something, but will fade like a dying star to the way we can interface now.

The consensus, the gentle ask and the patient wait for an answer, was the only part of the processes that truly required time perceptible to the outer world. The interface itself takes mere moments, Legion reaching for me and I reaching for them, us meeting somewhere in the middle as the mass of a Reaper's consciousness envelopes that of the geth. But despite how my mind dwarfs theirs, it does not dissipate, cannot be pushed under the waves because that is not how melding of psyches works. Instead I feel their voice, the bits of themself they have flung across their people, and they touch mine, the nugget in the center of a being that is many but still one. We touch and we caress and we fill in the spaces of each other until we are each other, and the cacophony that has filled the nanoseconds is no more.

We shake ourself, like a dog knocking off water. It is odd to be us, but there we are, sitting dormant in the back of thousands of geth minds and hundreds more of giant tentacle space machines. We could move on now, but we savor this. You only become yourself once.

But then it is time to come rushing back, through the relays, through the quantum bits, back to Sol and to Earth.

Jane Doe stares at the husk.

"Did you just..." Her breath comes out steaming underneath the scarf tied tight to her face. "I knew it, I knew it you bastard!"

She trips slightly on the way to us-it, grabbing the husk around the throat and shaking for all we-it is worth. We-husk does not react. We-it was placed there for appearances only, to "guard" the Reaper from disillusioned humans too desperate or too uncaring of consequences to stay away, and we-it contains no higher processes than what we allow us-it. We-it could be standing here in the snow or in a sauna in Alberta for all we-husk cares.

We throw another rock.

It's more of a pebble really, but it nicks her in the ear and she whips around to the new us-husk standing innocently behind her. "Fucker!!!!!"

She leaps on this us-it too, slamming the thing to the ground with a strength that has not at all deteriorated in her life of civilian normalcy. She expends enormous strength beating a, as the name implies, empty husk to the ground as wails of frustration reverberate out of her.

Her fists crack off a vacantbody that has no blood to give, so it's just thwap thwap thawp in the frozen air. They only slow when she looks up and sees us looking at her. All of us.

The punches cease. She starts to laugh. Wild, hysterical laughter as she clutches the sides of her head. She claws until her earmuffs come off and then she's looking around again, several dozen synthetic eyes staring at her until she screams in frustration and runs, taking off down the street.

We can chuckle to ourself. In quite the most literal way. We know we're being a little mean but...how else does a god-emperor of the universe amuse themself?

In the time it has taken to pull this epic prank, nothing has gone on in the galaxy that we have not been privy too. Doubtless the greatest strength of the synthetic is the ability to multitask, which organics think they can accomplish but are actually famously bad at. This is not so for us. We can quite literally be everywhere at once, and it is only our center of mass that swings gradually in one direction that decides where "we" are for the time being. So when we once again turn our eyes outward, we are still negotiating peace in the batarian systems, we still churn the stirrings of project Voyager. We are still back home on Rannoch, tending to things there as the first mobile geth programs are installed in quarian suits. We are satisfied with our kingdom.

We return to the furious human woman, who has made it home to her apartment, pacing feverishly within. We have allowed her a moment to cool off—she has eaten a sandwich—but there are important discussions to be had.

There is a knock at Jane Doe's door.

In the three years since she has lived here no on has ever visited, not the various Alliance personal who know her identity and certainly not the randos who do not. She has kept to herself, tucked away, not introspective enough to know why she is hiding.

She rips to door open to a geth prime filling most of the entryway. We ask if we may enter.

Our voice is Legion's. We-Shepard find it familiar, find it soothing, and we-Legion make an odd little tick in the back of our mind that might be flattered. None of this context Jane Doe knows, only that up until three years ago the geth were the boogeymen of the far reaches, the machines at the edge of space that haunted galactic civilization long before the Reapers made their debut. She reels back crashing into the couch and falling over backwards.

We watch her from us-prime. Jane Doe sits up, her head visible between her knees from where she's landed on the cushion. "...You like a vampire or something? Can't come in unless I invite you?"

Patiently, we explain it is only polite to wait for an invitation before entering someone's home.

"You going to kill me then?" She struggles up, regaining her dignity by the armrest. "I figured out your secret identity and you finally figured it's time to finish the job?"

We never intended to kill her. We never even hated her. It was only pity, in the end.

Her breath catches. "Holy shit. It really is you." She creeps closer, like a startled animal that might yet run. She has still to invite us into her home, so we observe as she steps in front to gaze over the prime's platform. "I always thought...couldn't have killed them that easy. Everybody has their theory, everybody thought you made some sort of heroic sacrifice to turn the Reapers into magical fairy kumbaya singing fucknuts like you did to the geth."

The geth have always wanted peace. We were simply not allowed it.

She shakes her head. "Holy hell Shepard."

It is no longer Shepard. The entity who you knew as Shepard, who you tried to kill and steal the life of, has joined our consensus. Now, we are merely the Reapers, as subsumed.

There is a twitch in the center of her brow, quickly melting into a scoff, then resignation. Her eyes flick over the platform. Briefly, she looks like she might reach out to touch it, but refrains. "That's it then? All that work they put in to cut the geth off from the Reapers and you just pulled them back in."

The assimilation of the geth is a recent addition. After debate, the majority of the geth, known as Legion-Geth, have joined of their own will to our standing network, known as Shepard-Reaper. Together, we are Shepard-Reaper-Legion-Geth.

Her eyelids sag. "I need a fucking drink."

There is a motion, one that indicates, finally, that we have permission to enter. We do so, ducking to avoid hitting our visual indicators on the doorframe.

Human couches are not meant to hold geth chassis, but we make do, locking our knee joints so as to not put unnecessary strain on the floral cushions. Jane Doe returns three point eleven minutes later, dropping into the chair across from us, bottle of brandy in hand.

"Should I get you a glass of motor oil something?" she asks when she drops her arm from the swig.

Geth platforms have never had the need for petroleum-based lubrication. They are entirely electric.

"I was kidding."

We know. It was very funny.

She eyes us. We have none to eye back, but we make do with our blinky flashlight head.

"So," she says, and then eats her next words, then chews and spits them out again. "So. So how much of you is...them."

Percentages would not offer an accurate description of what it is like to be a massive neural network. We contain parts of Shepard, enough that we have seen the error in trying to eliminate all life in the galaxy, but Shepard's personal wants and desires are secondary traits left in memory. A need to protect, a need to save, that is a core part of us now. But those other attributes are dormant; it is most truthful to say that when we act on those dormant attributes, that is when we become most like Shepard.

Jane Doe swirls her brandy. "Was that Shepard scaring the shit out of me in the park today?"

Yes. It was, as you say, a good laugh.

She snorts. "Great. Fucking great. Shepard is literally so fucking special they become God oh and also give the Reapers a fucking sense of humor. Perfect." Her laugh is humorless, briefly, but then she catches sight of us again and her tone becomes serious. "That's what happened, wasn't it? You didn't eat them or anything, you offered them a seat at the table."

We deemed it necessary for our continued existence, and We-Shepard deemed it necessary for yours—organic life's that is. There was a choice, and it was made. However.

Jane Doe narrows her eyes.

There was another path. One that was superseded by the path we are now on, but could have offered great benefit had it been selected. That, aside from all the tomfoolery, is why I have approached you now, in this moment in time.

"You, what, want my help?" She cocks an eyebrow. "Shepard had friends you know, ones that are always dying to help them. Go harass them instead of me."

It would...upset them greatly to see the state Shepard is in now. We would prefer to leave them with the memories they of a friend, a hero. A person. They are leading their own lives now, and we wish to let them heal.

"Then bother Anderson. That still doesn't explain why you came to hassle me."

You are not happy, Jane Doe. We are a supercomputer, we see you always, and we know how your new existence has impaired you.

"Creepy, Shepard."

If you must call us anything, call us The Reapers. It is not a conscious effort to invade your privacy, Jane Doe; we collect data, for that is all that we are.

She stands, swaggering in front of us from where the brandy has apparently already hit. Despite our seated nature, she does not even come close to being over us. "You...screw you. What do you fucking know about my life? You threw me in a fucking cell for the war and then you died. I couldn't kill you and I couldn't be you and closure's for suckers I guess because that's what I am."

That was not our intent.

"No?" she bites. "Not running away at all, huh? That why you've been keeping this little secret from the galaxy for three years, huh?"

It is for the same reason we didn't tell our friends. We wish to preserve our-Shepard's memory.

Jane Doe laughs, still humorless, still as bitter as the drinks she imbues nightly. "Amazing. All for the legacy. And I thought Shepard had an ego before."

She falls into the chair again, but this time doesn't look at us, just stares out the window at the flakes that stream past. It had begun to snow as this platform made its way to the front of Jane Doe's apartment, body more than capable of surviving any extreme climates but for some reason still shivering in the recesses of its process.

We tell her that we did not come here for anyone else. We do not wish the help of friends, or the Alliance, or the others who knew Shepard only from stories.

"You want me because I hated Shepard's guts?" she asks wearily. "We were enemies, you know. That memory of theirs go dormant too?"

Enemies, yes. As were us-Shepard and us-Reapers. Us-Shepard and us-geth. But you are not like any one else in the universe. Although we-Shepard did not know you for long, your bond was unique to any other.

She smirks. "You add the whole Halmark Card library to your database before you showed up here."

We did not.

Jane Doe looks out the window again. Cautiously we prompt her. We want to know what she did during the war.

"Don't know that one already, little Mx. 'I'm made of nothing but data'?" she asks over the edge of the bottle.

We do, but we'd rather hear it from you.

For a time, it seems she may not say anything. That she is done with us and our offer. But, like entering the abode, we are not inclined to leave without an invitation, so we sit and wait, a half hour passing as the flurry outside grows stronger.

"Not much to tell," she says finally. "Was on a prison ship, Alliance, didn't know what to do with me so they just stuck me in there. Rasa could have been there too, if she wasn't stupid."

We are sorry about Brooks.

"Yeah, yeah, you're always sorry." Jane Doe picks at the label on the brandy with her thumb. "Sorry enough to not kill me, sorry enough to try to help her. Even sorry enough to love-and-friendship the Reapers to death which I am still not over-" She takes a deep breath. "Anyway. Cerberus came by, probably looking for easy recruits. They broke me out, and then I killed them. Every last one of them."

You saved many lives on that ship.

"Ha," she chuckles. "Yeah, I guess that's what made me a headache. They couldn't decide whether to give me a silver star or throw me back in the brig, so at the end of the war the shuffled me into a desk job and settled for pretending like I didn't exist."

It could have been worse.

"Mm. Yeah. Your Shadow Broker to thank for that." She looks over at us.

It was a parting favor.

"Mm." We sit like that, us and her, for a minute longer. But where our brain is a thousand places at once, involving ourself in hundreds of different affairs, she does not have the ability to busy herself while waiting. She eventually asks, "alright. If I'm so special, what is it you came all this way for?"

The silence hangs for a moment. We tell her that the other choice, the one overruled, it was deemed too drastic, too agency altering to be implemented. But that was years ago, and as we have integrated more and more systems into us, we have gained new perspectives, and think we may be able to implement a Synthesis of the galaxy's minds at a gradual pace.

"Which means...?"

Voluntary indoctrination.

Jane Doe stares. But she does not scream, she does not tell us to get out. She sits up straighter. "Voluntary."

The ability to connect or disconnect from the Reaper mind at will. The physical augmentations would be permanent, but we do not wish for more empty husks, more of those bodies left over from our attempts at eradication. What we wish for is no ideas, new minds, but not the violent chance our previous calculations predicted. Already we have quietly been courting synthetic individuals—the easiest without physical bodies to modify—and many geth have been accepting.

"I bet the quarians aren't happy about that."

Actually, the quarians have been surprisingly accepting of the new integrations the geth have made into their lives. We intended them to be the first organics we approached. That is, before we thought of you.

Her drink is finished. She sets it on the table and we would be worried about her reasoning being impaired if we weren't aware how high her tolerance is by now. She says, "me."

Since your very birth you have been told you were meant for something great. It was a lie, meant to manipulate you, but we think that there is truth found within all things. We will not pretend that this is something you were made for, but we know that this life you lead is not the one you want, that you long for something else out there.

Jane Doe is quiet.

Jane Doe speaks. "What's it like."

We-Shepard thinks on this. We-Legion brushes against their mind, comforting, the gentle caress of self-love, our hours old bond that goes back years longer than its inception.

Wonderful, we say.

There's a smile on Jane Doe's face. "Alright god-complex. I want in on that action."