MEHR Behind the Curtain part 4 4000 word milestone reached! (Patreon)

MASS EFFECT HUMAN REVOLUTION

BEHIND THE CURTAIN PART 4

Even as he looked at her porcelain face – her unbelievably perfect, beautiful porcelain face — Adam couldn't stop his mind from trying to process the fact that there was a smelly hobo version of himself behind the counter. He could practically feel Conrad's justifications trying to cut off the myriad branches of his own suspicions: Of COURSE there would be an alternate timeline version of him in all this insanity. It doesn't mean anything. Stop asking questions.

But Adam Jensen was like a dog with a bone, and he kept catching the scent of a big juicy one, full of fresh marrow. He could imagine this aspect of himself, panting over said bone even as another woman  — clad in Neo-Renaissance dark silks — pets him, whispering to him what he had always known deep in his heart and soul.

Everybody Lies, said Eliza Cassan.

Why did he remember her now, of all times? That AI newscaster, that tool of the Illuminati, that machine designed to re-frame the truth to suit the needs of those manipulative bastards he had failed to bring to justice, so long ago?

Everybody Lies...

...she had told him, before giving him an once of truth to send him on his way.

And Conrad, for all the good he did, for all the help he gave, was a liar, just like Everybody else.

You're so close, said the dog in Adam's mind. You can almost taste it, the truth behind everything, what lies behind the curtain. You just need everything to click.

Curtain? Adam wondered. Like in Oz? If there's a curtain, who's the wizard behind it all?

Suddenly, one of Fyodor's drawings, some of the first that he had ever seen on the Durendal's floor, came to mind... No, that's stupid, that's impossible. Hein's no wizard, he's a mortal man, he's meat and bones and blood and he's lying in bed on the verge of death.

...Everybody LIES.

With a gesture, a small mandala of golden light appeared around the android's wrist, and through what could only be the Mass Effect – or perhaps something else? — the shotgun was drawn into her hand, then kept aloft, inches from her delicate looking fingers.

Then, it began to shine, as it turned into a cloud of particles, then a complex prism of ethereal glass. Immediately, Adam recognized the shape, like the Forma that Hein kept in storage. Then, the Forma dissolved into Elsa's palm. Anyone else would have assumed the weapon had just been destroyed, but Adam, having seen a couple of episodes of Star Trek, assumed  that she had stored it elsewhere for later use. He was proven correct when he caught a glimpse of her AR interface – rings within rings of pale yellow light detailing an elaborate grid of items – and it seemed she 'carried' an incredible arsenal.

Adam tried not to think too hard about how good she looked as a brunette... or with a blindfold, not while her future dead body was wrapped in foil only kilometers away.

Jesus fucking Christ, this is so fucking weird.

“Hey,” said Elsa in front of him... the living, brown-haired version of Elsa. The alternate timeline Elsa. Or was it... past Elsa? Was her name even Elsa? It wasn't, but Adam didn't know it.

He had been standing there awkwardly with his hands up for a few seconds, the 108's faceplate hiding the expressions he made when he cogitated too damned hard. 

“What are you?” she asked finally, scanning his armour. “Type-T?”

“Type-T?” Adam asked, more confused than ever. 

“Titan,” she added, her suspicions growing. She tapped the side of his head with her sword, and Adam could feel the hum of the high frequency vibrations that gave her weapon such absurd cutting power. “You look heavy enough to be one, but...” she says, giving his suit another look in spite of her blindfold. Adam could feel his body resonate with a slight hum. “You've been built for speed,” her tone suggested that this wasn't normal for a Titan. “And stealth, and power... you're way too generalized to be a Type T.”

She thinks I'm like her, Adam realized. A synthetic.

Elsa let a menacing edge get into her voice: “You're a Type K.”

Adam shakes his head, “If K stands for what I think it does, then no.”

“What are you, then?”

Sensing that he'd need to talk his way out of getting his throat cut, Adam activated his CASIE aug, at which point his AR display glitched and rebooted, teal and orange making way for blocks of warm grey and black fonts. Gibberish appeared over Elsa's head, a strange alphabet that made way for latin letters that formed Elsa's ID:

Gestalt 0451 “Michaëlle”

Yorha Replicant Body Five One Gen-6, Pilot Type 

Michaëlle... Adam thought. Now that he knew her name, it felt right then as if  'Elsa' had been borrowed from something, a movie, or a video game, or something. Tacked on by someone with no imagination. Somehow, “Michaëlle” felt right.

And in spite of being synthetic, Michaëlle was so lifelike the Computer Assisted Social Intelligence Enhancer had no problem coming up with a summary of her psyche and her current emotional state: Determined, Violent, Paranoid. Masks it all under a veneer of calm and stoicism. Elevated Stress levels suggests and micro-expressions suggest she fears for her life and Adam Jensen's.

He was just about to say something to put her at ease when he heard it: the rhythmic thumping, the footfalls of a giant beast. He looked outside...

...And saw an enormous mechanical lizard charging straight towards him.  

“Oh, merde!” cursed Michaëlle, seeing the enormous war machine. Distracted, she couldn't stop Adam from grabbing both her and his alternate self just before Zero Shifting away. Reflexively, she activated her owb Schrödinger organ, part of an enhanced mobility system far more sophisticated than Adam's Promethean-enhanced DARPA augs.

His own Element Zero cores interacting with Michaëlle's Maso fibers intergrated in her hollow CNT muscle fibers, Adam's senses were utterly confused by the input of being four — no, eight! — places at once, so much so that his Zero-Shift was stopped halfway through. The trio appeared in the middle of the street, far from safety. The mental shock of the interrupted biotic charge hit the trio like a truck, and they fall onto each other.

The beast turned its head towards then, and Adam got a better look at it: Bipedal, digitigrade legs, twice the size of an elephant. The white ceramic of its skin-armour was infested with some kind of pulsating mass, red and pink and wet, the stuff CHAOS was made of. Spirals had been drawn on its skin with red paint, matching the same tribal markings of its rider... a naked savage, covered in stitches, bearing a white mask.

Adam's eyes sparked, and a vision of some of Hock's guests appeared in his mind. White masked people, eating him alive. Eating him alive... 

The rider screamed, twirling a long, weaponized sex organ — probably a horse's — above his head. The flesh had been cured rock solid, and spikes had been punched through it. 

“MEAT!” the Rider bellowed, and let loose a shrill war cry. Elsewhere and not far, the cry was responded to in kind, and a horde of cannibals began to spill forth from around a street corner, then another, and another, and before long close to a thousand half-naked savages came running, eyes full of lust staring straight at the two cyborgs and the synthetic.

Adam had seen this before, this wave of human flesh, powered by hate, when the cutters announced the start of the Skyllian Blitz by dropping the Black Gas on Elysium... and it made his blood run cold.

“GAIANS!” shouted Michaëlle, as she helped Adam get back on his feet. “RUN!”

[h+]

For a gynoid and a cyborg in power armour, escaping from a horde of savages had been relatively simple, even with the added burden of a half-starved man with outdated, ancient mechanical augmentations.

Escape had been easy, yes, but hiding from the keen senses of a thousands heads had been far more difficult, especially since the alternate Adam, to put it mildly, really, really stank.

The apartment they hid into, mercifully, had running water and a bathtub, as white as anything else in this copied city. Too weak to protest, the other Adam had been unceremoniously dumped by his future self into the hot water. “Thanks,” he said, weakly.

“You're welcome,” replied Adam. 

“Where's Michaëlle?” asked the other.

First name basis, huh? thought Adam. “She's running interference, luring those freaks away from here.”

“I hope she's okay,” Past Adam muttered, weakly. 

“She's stronger than she looks.”

“I know that... but still.”

“Hey, are you going to be okay?”

“...I'm so fucking hungry, You have no idea.”

“I've got some idea, actually.” Adam looked back at the open bathroom door, and thought of the kitchen beyond it. There were boxes of cereal back there, and he thought that perhaps some of that white stuff was edible?

“Don't bother,” said the bathing Adam. “That shit's not edible, I tried.” He sighed. “We've been looking for something for me to eat for days.”

“The animals outside are pretty edible,” Adam said. 

“Tried that too.”

“What happened?”

“Giant fucking robot dinosaurs ridden by cannibals happened.”

“...Wow.”

“Yeah, if Michaëlle hadn't found me...” he left the possibilities unsaid, and his stomach growled. 

Adam thought about signaling his team again and ordering them to rendez-vous at his current location, but he didn't want to expose them to any more danger on his account. 

Rescuing him from Bekenstein had been more than enough.

Still, he thought, burying his feelings of guilt at Elsa's death... Ramsus should still have that hunk of moose meat. 

But no. Run and hide from the cannibal horde. Those were his orders. And besides... Garrus was stressed out enough as it was. Two Adams would have pushed him over the edge.

Then, he remembered that the 108 came with a small reservoir of Medi-Gel. Bringing up the haptics of the 108's integrated Omni-Tools, Adam summoned a medical app and, using logic that could only come from Promethean techno-magical bullshit, folded the Gel's proteins into something vaguely nutritious.

When was the last time I ever used an Omni-Tool? he wondered. It hadn't been that long ago, but due to his direct link to electronics, using one usually felt as intuitive as flexing a finger.

“Here,” he said, handing a makeshift candy bar at his starving self. “That ought to raise your energy meter by a couple of bars.”

“Oh, thanks...” even starved, the younger Adam knew better than just wolfing down his meal. Each small bite he took, however, tasted like ambrosia. “I've got questions.”

“You and me both. Shoot.”

“Who are you?”

“Promise not to freak out?”

“I'm too fucking weak to freak out.”

The 108's helmet opened. It took a moment for Adam to recognize Adam, on account of being used to seeing the reverse image on his face in the mirror, but then:

“...Okay, freaking out a little bit. What the fuck.” All things considered, Adam was taking it pretty well.

“Yep.”

“Are you a clone, or something?”

“Sounds like something Sarif would do, yeah? Cloning us.”

A chuckle. “Yeah, or the Illuminati.”

“But no... near as I can tell, I'm future you.”

Adam quirked his eyebrow at him. His eyes were so expressive, on account of his lack of cybernetic shades. “...Are you sure?”

“No. But it's the only thing that makes sense right now.”

“This could be a dream I'm having...”

“What makes you think that?”

“Michaëlle...” he said her name softly. “She's too beautiful...” he sighed. “The stuff of dreams.”

Hoo boy, thought Adam, standing besides the bathing cyborg. Love at first sight, looks like. “I think we'd dream of something more pleasant to do with an impossibly pretty and finely dressed french robot woman than slowly starve in a post-apocalyptic detroit.”

“Maybe it's not our dream,” replied Adam, operating on the logic of a tired mind trapped in a starved body.

Ramsus' words echoed in Adam's head: Minds aren't like a novel I can immediately flip to the relevant page and pick out the information I need. It's more like a wiki walk. And I have to start with a random article, and every other word is a hyperlink that I have to tap. As you can imagine, it's a trifle. confusing.

As confusing as those trips through time. As confusing as a dream.

“You're getting warmer,” said the Warrior, behind Adam. Startled, Adam turned around, but did not see the strange figure that he had encountered in...

Dosadi.

The dream machine. Memories.

Adam recalled Echo's words: Have you ever struggled to stay awake, but closed your eyes for just a moment, and in the blink of an eye fully imagined a place you had never visited, or a person you had never met?

Once or twice, he had replied, likening that trait of the human mind as being like a god, with dominion of all things inside one's mind.

Whose dreams are these? Adam wondered. Whose memories are these? Those were the right questions to ask, but who could answer them?

“Is someone here?” asked the bathing Adam, worried. “Are we in danger?” He was getting livelier, the candy bar was working wonders.

“No, we're fine,” but having said that, Adam still checked the area with his smart vision, just to make sure. No hostiles. Gotta stay in the here and now, he thought. Survive this, or wake up, whatever. There will be a time to figure out this insanity later.

[h+]

Just when I think things can't get more insane, thought Garrus, marveling at the five fingers on his gun hand, THIS shit happens:

Adam's warning had come at the right time, having given them plenty of time to prepare for an onslaught of cannibals. It was the false Conrad's complete panic at the situation and Ramsus' amusement the kid's mental state that had nearly squandered it all. Only Hannibal and Teg had the good sense to prepare for a fight.

When the horde of white masked cannibals — Didn't Manah mention those? Hock's party? I forget — had arrived, Hannibal had leapt into the fray, using his integrated melee weapons to cut them apart, which Garrus had been thankful for, as they were sorely lacking in the kind of rapid fire crowd control weaponry at that particular moment in time. Teg made up for that with continuous use of his integrated Omni-Tool's Overload, keeping hundreds of cannibals stunned, while Ramsus provided the biotic artillery necessary to scatter the horde.

The last of them got on his knees in awe of Ramsus, sputtering something about reborn dragons. Ramsus savoured that moment of being worshiped, just before exploding the cannibal's head.

They had won.

And then time stuttered and broke, rewound, and the cannibals came charging at them again.

“Goddamnit, Conrad!” yelled Garrus. 

“What did I do?!” protested the human.

“You're the time wizard! DO SOMETHING! Stop these assholes from respawning!”

 “That's not how it works!”

Garrus called the group to retreat into the Sarif building, its atrium providing him with an ideal kill zone, while Hannibal and Ramsus took advantage of the escalator to funnel the horde into close combat.

Unfortunately, cannibal reinforcements came in the form of insane, meat-infested robot animals.

“Friends of yours?!” yelled Garrus, as he shot a tiger made of polymer actuators in the head.

Hannibal, always up for a verbal fencing match with Garrus was oddly silent. Whatever, Garrus thought, before he ordered the group to keep moving up, floor by floor, towards the roof, where he assumed a VTOL craft would be waiting for them, as Citadel regulations demanded.

But this was not the Citadel, and Sarif had the helipad built in the courtyard. By the time Garrus had realized his mistake, they had arrived on the roof, and found themselves surrounded by the cannibals that had followed them – insanely enough – by climbing the outside of the skyscraper.

Garrus messaged to Adam for help, but the signal was getting too much interference. He checked his ammo block: he was running low, and those giant robotic birds looked like they would take a lot of bullets to take down.

Then, Conrad's Chameleon system kicked in, and Garrus literally stopped being a turian. Instead, his body assumed the appearance of a grey-haired human male clad in some kind very comfortable looking uniform. Ramsus and Conrad had been affected too, only it was just their wardrobe that had been altered: they wore the same uniform – black velvet, with golden buttons. Hannibal and Teg had new paintjobs, and Elsa's body... had been turned into a crate.

The group, save Conrad, stared at each other in utter confusion, then at the cannibals, who were just as confused, then back at each other.

 “What the...”

Before Garrus could ask Conrad what was the hell was happening, a flying wing streaked by, firing a multitude of energy munitions that reminded Garrus of biotic bolts. A few seconds later, the horde was pretty much gone, and the flying wing's two passengers dropped in to mop up the rest. Garrus was impressed at how fast they worked, and at their accuracy – not a single shot was wasted, and the last remaining cannibal died to a perfectly executed Mozambique Drill.

They had won, and this time, it was for good.

“Clear!” Garrus shouted, scanning the area down the sights of this rifle. Nothing was moving, nothing that wanted to eat or rape them, anyways.

“Clear,” echoed Ramsus, his own military training kicking in, much to his chagrin. Teg and Hannibal followed suit, with Conrad tapping his green interface for anything out of the ordinary. “Yeah, clear!” he said, nervously.

Garrus eyed their rescuers curiously as they approached them. – they were humans! Very pretty humans. Too pretty. Their faces... their skin was so smooth, like Brea's, and their faces just too symmetrical. They couldn't be Snatchers – those things blended in better. 

It looked suspiciously like those Lancers the Alliance loved so much. In spite of himself, Garrus recalled bonding with Grey over how much of a shitty assault rifle the Lancer was.

Of course, he then thought... Lancers didn't fire beams of energy like...like the Serpents. Huh... weird.

Conrad's voice resounded inside Garrus' skull, and as the turian marveled at his new human fingers – they felt so real! - he assumed correctly that the others could hear it too: “Let me handle this, and whatever you do, don't ask them questions!” 

Garrus shared a look with Ramsus: they both knew that Conrad wasn't going to handle this well.

[h+]

“Hey guys!” shouted Steiner, waving his hand at the rescuees, eager to make friends of them.

“Looks like we arrived just in time!” said Symeon as he approached, slinging his Lancer Assault Carbine over his shoulder. It wasn't a real one, of course, an imitation packed with the latest tech, a custom job Symeon had put together himself for old time's sake.

He scanned them with his visor. The grey haired Ranger-Type android — who was admiring his hand, for some reason — was designated 'Gary', according to his IFF signal. The Sorcerer-type, the one that had used old style biotics against their attackers, was designated 'Jack', while the Support-Type coming forward to speak to Symeon was designated 'Vernon'. Their mechs – two of them? — were tagged “K9” and “RE5”.

Varied team composition, thought Symeon, your typical standard Strike team, but where's their Titan? He also thought their name were a little... simple. Apparently, the androids running the Baptisms were running out of ideas.

Conrad cleared his throat. “Thanks! I thought those Gaians were going to have us for dinner!”

“That was a LOT of them!” exclaimed Steiner, a little too cheerfully for Symeon's tastes. “I mean, I knew millions of them escaped the last battle through those Corridors, but WOW!” Steiner hadn't fought in that battle, had no idea what GAIA's failures were capable of...

“Glad we could help,” said Symeon, his tone even, a foil to his partner. “What the hell are you guys doing here, anyways? Why aren't you connected to the Network?”

“Yeah,” said Steiner, backing Symeon up. “We nearly missed you guys.”

Vernon pointed at the crate slung over the mech's shoulder, and began to explain: “We were delivering some top secret materials to the local re-creation team before the Gaians ambushed us.”

“What kind of materials?” probed Symeon.

“The kind too sensitive to Transmat,” said Vernon, a little too quickly. Symeon checked the crate again: it was big enough to contain an entire android, and wrapped in warning tape. His visor couldn't penetrate the outer plating. 

Symeon eyed 'Vernon' suspiciously. Android's lying, no need for any secondary programs running to figure that out. “Huh huh. I don't suppose you'd have a problem verifying your op with the Tower, right?”

 “Oh, we're ah...” Vernon leaned in, conspiratorially, “look, we're on a secret mission by given to us by the Triumvirate. You know how they feel about discretion, right?”

Yes, Symeon knew, and he didn't give a damn. He HATED the Triumvirate. He had no reason to respect their wishes or the people that worked directly for them.

“I'm guessing it's Forma extracted straight from the Maker,” continued Vernon.

“Is that so?” Symeon played along. “Nines?” he sub-vocalized to his partner. “Do you read an encrypted two-way signal from any of them?”

“Nope,” Steiner responded. “They're completely cut off. Why, is that important?”

Very important, replied Symeon, his replica Kessler pistol appearing in hand. The Triumvirate are control freaks.

The energy bolt ripped past 'Vernon's' shields, melted past several layers of high-tech material, before settling deep inside his foot. In the space of time that it took for Vernon to scream “MY FOOOOOOT!” Steiner had already disabled the mechs' actuators, paralyzing them in place, and had disabled the Ranger type's weapon.

Vernon reached for his wrist. In response Symeon stepped on it, preventing him from using whatever offensive program the rogue android was planning on using. He kept his gun pointed at the Sorcerer's head, while Steiner kept his hand pointed at the Ranger, subtly threatening to erase his black box if he made one wrong move. 

The Ranger was definitely itching to make a move, snarling like a turian, but the Sorcerer kept his cool, smiling.

“I'm going to count to five,” said Symeon, blissfully unaware that the 'Sorcerer' was probing this mind. “And if I don't get some goddamned truth I'm going to get really trigger happy.”

The Sorceror sighed. “Conrad, you'd think that with infinity at your fingertips... you'd get good at lying.”

“One,” started Symeon.

“Really, you should have just told him about Adam straight from the get-go. As luck would have it, they're old friends.”

Symeon shook his head. Adam? No... it couldn't be, “Two!”

“Come now, Symeon, try to remember, when it all began for you...” The Sorceror approached.

“Three!”

“Do they sleep within you, the Memories of Neo-Kobe?”

“F-Four...”

“Go ahead,” said the Sorceror, daring Symeon to shoot him, pointing at his forehead. “Blow my brains out... blow ALL our brains out. But then... you'll never lay eyes on Adam Jensen ever again.”

The fifth count does not come. “...What?”

“Because he's alive. He's out there, somewhere in this city, all alone. At the mercy of the Gaians, and if the Triumvirate's Type K's ever find him...”

“...Then they're going to cut him apart,” finished Symeon.

“Symeon?” asked Steiner. “What's going on? Who's Adam Jensen?”

“An old friend,” said Symeon, seemingly mollified. The Sorcerer smiled, almost smugly, thinking he had gotten through to him.

“A friend long dead,” added Symeon, bitterly, before signaling the Operator above to Transmat the lot of them.

[h+]