25 Unlikely Ally

--> Reaper corpse is in sight. There appears to be a small, unregistered ship alongside. Now who in blazes would be fool enough to board that thing I wonder?

--> We have the Reaper IFF. EDI has begun the process of assessment and installation.

The situation aboard the Reaper was even worse than I had feared. The science team Cerberus had sent was not only indoctrinated, they had found the means inside the Reaper to turn themselves into full-fledged Husks. Waves upon waves of mindless, howling monsters came pouring down the black halls of the Reaper’s innards, a grisly flood of death clawing to reach us, only to fall like chaff before our weapons. A lesser team would never have survived.

We found the strangest thing aboard the Reaper. A Geth sniper; one that shot Husks as they ambushed us. It then disappeared further into the Reaper. We caught up with it at the Reaper’s power core, hacking open the security. Husks sprung upon it from behind as we entered. The core destroyed, the Reaper crashing, we hauled the inert Geth out with us.

This is the first Geth I’ve ever seen working solo; and the only one that didn’t try to put a bullet inside my skull. What was it doing by itself aboard the Reaper, and why did it aid us? Perhaps strangest of all, when first spotted, it addressed me by name in plain English.

--> I’ve reactivated the Geth. It calls itself simply “Geth”, all of its programs forming one consciousness. EDI recommended the name “Legion.” It accepted the title as appropriate, naming the precise Bible verse it references. I confess I’m not proud to have been outdone in my own cultural knowledge by a pair of Ais.

Legion has told me many strange things. That the Geth as a whole did not serve Sovereign, that it was only a fraction of their number that chose to worship “the old machines” as Legion calls the Reapers. Consequently the Reapers are a threat to the remaining Geth. He calls the Geth who sided with the Reapers “Heretics.” When asked why the schism came about in a unified Geth neural network, Legion told me that “Geth believe that all life should self-determinate. The Geth will build their own future. The Heretics asked the Reapers to give them their future.” I asked what future Legion and his fellow Geth were planning for themselves. He replied simply “Ours.” When asked if organics would be affected by the Geth’s future, he responded “If they involve themselves, they will.”

Legion summarized the situation. Both of us oppose the Reapers, or Old Machines, and the Collectors serve them. In the interest of mutual goals, it suggested cooperation. Simple sense.

Hence we now have a Geth team-mate in our fight against the Collectors.

This new insight into the state of the Geth rewrites much of what we know. Firstly, Legion has individuality, personality, and opinions. He is not merely a machine, but a person. Even if he is the best of his kind, an exceptional step in their evolution, the Geth are far more than I had ever thought. How many hundreds have I killed while thinking I was only shutting down a machine? I’d do it again in an instant; they served Sovereign and sought to destroy organics, but the estimated cost in life Sovereign’s failed attempt on the Citadel entailed, already high, has now perhaps been doubled.

Secondly, if only a fraction of the Geth joined Sovereign, that means Geth can disagree, and all have at least some potential for individuality.

Thirdly, if the Geth who failed to join the Reapers were indeed doomed should Sovereign succeed, that means the Reapers do not discriminate; organic or synthetic, all who do not become slaves are to be destroyed. This means the motivations of the Reapers are not “machine vs man” but “greater vs the lesser.”

Legion had been aboard the Reaper corpse to obtain information on Reaper programming. He needed the information to use against a virus the Heretics have formed using Reaper methods. Once released upon Rannoch, all Geth will be turned to serving the Reapers. Mass Indoctrination of an entire species in a single shot.

Legion has the coordinates to the Heretic base. An abandoned deep-space outpost of Quarian design in the Phoenix Massing, it fell off star charts hundreds of years ago.

There’s a time limit on this. If we don’t stop the Geth Heretics now, their numbers will be increased a hundredfold. They won’t be hijacking civilian freighters. They’ll be invading Earth. We have to move now.

Needless to say, the crew is not entirely pleased with this turn of events: Tali in particular is apprehensive of the consequences should Legion attack. Honestly though, I'm not worried, for four reasons.

Firstly, the entire ship is already under constant surveillance, precluding the possibility of [ahem, unauthorized] surprise attack.

Secondly, we're hardly helpless babes; any one of the combat team could tackle a single hostile Geth, even one so advanced as Legion.

Thirdly, EDI is by definition an all but insurmountable impediment to hacking of the Normandy, and has already demonstrated such: if the Collectors could not effectively hack the Normandy, then even Geth hacking techniques bear little chance of success.

Fourthly, Legion himself has already passed up ideal opportunity aboard the dead Reaper to try killing us. Geth are nothing if not logical. It is indeed theoretically possible Legion's motivation for not trying to kill us earlier was for the sole purpose of getting access to the Normandy, but such a hypothesis has significant problems: there was no way Legion could reliably predict being taken aboard the Normandy in the first place, and given the hazards already outlined, trying tricks once aboard would be dicey at best. Geth are suicidally bold in pursuit of a given goal, but they're neither gamblers nor are they stupid. Such slim odds of success hardly constitute a viable stratagem.

--> The Heretic base is in sight. There are millions of Geth ground units in there. With the Normandy’s stealth drive to get us in and Legion to hack the security, we should face minimal resistance.

--> The Heretic base is now spacedust. It turns out the window was closing faster than even Legion had thought: the virus had been completed and was ready for launch. Legion suggested the possibility of using the Heretics’ own weapon against them and turning them into allies.

Absolutely not. I’ve no qualms about destroying an enemy, but I’ll be damned if I ever turn someone’s own will against them.

Legion discovered how Tali’s father had been conducting experiments on the Geth, and that the Quarians were considering launching an invasion. I can’t really blame him for wanting to transmit that information back to his people. Those weren’t just experiments; we now know they were actually war crimes, atrocities committed upon another sentient race. I persuaded Legion to not tell his people; the information would turn war from a possibility to a certainty, and both the Quarians and the Geth would be weakened.

The Reapers are coming. We need every ally strong.

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