Chapter 3: Psychedelic Therapy
Shepard vomited hard, all over Alenko’s shirt and pants, as well as the floor of the Normandy’s med bay. He recoiled.
“Doctor, she’s awake!” he called.
She vomited again, only hitting the floor this time. She felt someone pushing her legs over, arranging her into a position which would keep her from choking if she passed out but kept throwing up. Doctor Chakwas tipped her head back and poured something down her throat. Her stomach settled immediately.
She shakily gave the doctor a thumbs up.
“How are you feeling commander?” the doctor asked.
Shepard opened her mouth, but there was no way she could put what she’d seen into words. She shook her head.
The next few hours passed in a fugue. She could hear Dr. Chakwas telling everyone that she was “perfectly fine, physically”; Joker predictably joking; Captain Anderson talking in his stern, calm voice; and a rotating cast of the rest of the Normandy crew variously trying to offer reassurances, comfort, help… none of it mattered. They were all dead. Well, some of them were dying, their comforting words turned to tortured screams, their reassurances calling her to join them in the merciful grave. The only one who seemed to be making sense was Dr. Manuel, who’d remained intermittently sedated on the cot next to hers. Finally, she was left in relative peace as the ship’s lights dimmed and the night crew took over.
That was when Flere came in. “I doubt you’ve realized this, but you’ve been subvocalizing all day. Didn’t sound like you were talking to me, though. Sounded like you were trying to warn the crew of something. Shall we see if we can get your tongue unstuck?”
Flere’s storage hatch opened, and a handful of small, brown lumps and a white pill fell out, guided by a mass effect field to the bedside table. An old-fashioned paper notebook and pencil came next.
Taking them seemed pointless against the sheer magnitude of the horror which had swept over the galaxy, but some small, subconscious portion of her brain recognized that story as indecorous, bearing-the-same-relation-to-beauty-as-falsity-bears-to-truth, and also recognized what Flere had supplied as medication for failures-relative-to-beauty. She swallowed the chunks of psilocybin truffles and antiemetic, then laid back and tried to focus on her breathing, rather than the flashes of slaughter still burning in her eyes.
Flere played soothing music and Jane continued meditative breathing until the instruments and bulkheads of the med bay began to dance and sway in the psychedelic haze. When she felt up to it, she took one last, deep breath and then gently pushed her thoughts towards the flashed impulses which still dominated her conscious thoughts.
The visions were… difficult for her ego, already battered and now suffering drug-induced vulnerability, to tolerate, but there was also a level of abstraction which helped her cope with the events? Feelings? Archetypes? Which the beacon had imparted. The familiar floaty, euphoric feeling of the psilocybin high also helped. She free-associated about the vision aloud while Flere listened, while doodling in the notebook, letting her hand move as it willed across the page.
“Do you remember how this all started?” Flere asked when she was done.
“I… yes. The prothean beacon. I approached it and… this happened.”
“Why did you approach it?”
“Kaidan. He got close first, I pushed him away.”
Shepard sketched a rough caricature of the biotic marine.
“Why would you have done that if he were already dead or dying?”
“I… guess I wouldn’t have.”
“And the beacon? Suppose you were the one who made it. Why would you have done such a thing?”
“A prank? Or to tell a traditional story? Cultural or physiological differences might have caused a stronger reaction than anticipated? Or a fail-safe could have broken since its creation?” As she spoke, Jane already realized that, once she managed to stop being horrified at what she’d seen, it was completely trivial to come up with explanations which were far more reasonable than her perceptions being literally true here and now. “But the protheans studied humans. There’s no way they didn’t. And we would have been more or less anatomically modern. Why would they have come up with a storage method which would last that long just to pass on a story?”
“Why, indeed?”
“They could have tailored the experience to asari, turians, salarians, humans, batarians, whatever. Or at least made it clearer. The protheans weren’t dumb.”
“So, when do you not take the time to formulate a clear message?” Asked like that, the question answered itself.
“When time is running out. An XK or near-XK scenario. If it’s something recurring, then they’d want to warn whoever was left so they could prepare. But… why is there anyone left? What could wipe out a galaxy-spanning civilization and leave sentient primitives untouched?”
Flere didn’t respond, and the psychedelics soon carried Jane away from the thought. She spent the remaining trip time integrating the thoughts, reimposing her old understanding of reality on her current situation, relegating the vision, for lack of a better word, to a description of past events and possible warning about future ones. Concerning, but not worth giving up entirely. Depending on what exactly she was seeing, it was entirely possible that the prothean warning might not be in vain. So figuring out what she was seeing was a high priority item. As the peak of the trip began, she simply lay back as the calming chant from Flere’s speakers helped restore order to her mind.
When she was sober enough to read, she disconnected the medical sensors she’d been attached to and stepped into the lab attached to the med bay. She sat at a terminal and ordered Flere to pull up any literature on the fall of the prothean empire. Flere only pretended to be a library drone, but they did, in fact, have excellent library software to maintain the pretense. Soon, they were bouncing ideas off each other as they skimmed abstract after abstract. The short version was that there wasn’t much about the fall of the prothean empire. Evidently, the field had been pioneered by an asari matriarch, one Professor T’Sirra. She’d found a truly absurd number and quality of documents pertaining to the prothean empire’s last days. When she’d died around 400 years ago, her estate contained incontrovertible evidence that, for whatever reason, she’d fabricated almost everything she’d found. Evidently this matriarch had deep political connections to many universities with respectable archaeology departments, and she’d discredited every theory which contradicted her own and banished their proponents from the halls of academia. Since this was less than half an asari generation ago, essentially all high-ranking academics, who’d built their careers on the T’Sirra “theory”, still acted as if the stench of crankery clung to those theories which were based around actual evidence.
So, with some reluctance, the two of them turned off the well-tended garden path of academic respectability and into the mire of extranet armchair speculators. Unfortunately, this offered the opposite problem from the polite, respectful “we don’t know what’s going on so fuck off”s of the academics. It seemed that everyone had a theory about the fall of the prothean empire and everyone’s was different.
“Hang on, I found something interesting.” Flere spoke up several hours into the process.
Jane looked up. “Yeah?”
“Yes, a volus. Kirsha Von. He had a theory of cyclic galactic mass extinction events. He worked as part of a mining cooperative, but he was also an amateaur geologist and archaeologist. He noticed that dig sites all over the galaxy kept turning up odd geological formations. Bands of eezo, heavy metals, ash, and other compounds associated with catastrophic destruction of spacecraft. These were massive in scope and could be found on almost every planet with a mass relay in-system. Out of relay systems, they showed up in an inverse square frequency.”
“So these bands show up on planets which were colonized from the relay system?”
“Exactly. And here’s the thing. It’s not just one layer. On Seinhand, he found dozens. And get this. Dating the bands found that they came from the same time, or within a few hundred years at least, even on planets on opposite sides of the galaxy.”
“Holy shit. Why haven’t I heard of this before now?”
“Kirsha lived about a hundred years before T’Sirra kicked off. He wrote up his findings, tried to publish, got rejected, then fucked off and made an unfathomable fortune on iridium mining. The Von family is still one of the richest in the galaxy.”
“Think they’d be interested in funding a grant to study his theory on the prediction markets?”
“Doubtful. His immediate heirs seemed to have done their best to bury that particular part of the family history, and largely succeeded. Pun very much intentional.”
Shepard left Flere to continue trawling crypto-arcaeology forums while she followed up the volus’ work. It seemed that, in the ruin left in T’Sirra’s wake, his work had been well and truly buried. Jane didn’t even want to imagine what sorts of dross Flere had been forced to dig through to find it. But their earlier search had turned up a relatively young asari who’d recently graduated from Thessia University and who’d written a literature review of the evidence which hadn’t come from T’Sirra for her dissertation. She’d apparently missed Von’s work, though.
She composed a quick message, using some carefully formulated statements about her time in the Bayesian Conspiracy to make herself sound like a curious human academic without straying into outright lies, and asked Dr. T’Soni if she had an opinion on Von’s paper. Shortly afterwards, she received a polite response that she was unfamiliar with the geological methods that Von’s conclusions relied upon, but that his theory was certainly interesting. She was currently doing field work on a planet called Therum, but that she would love to discuss the paper and its implications the next time she was in civilized space. Shepard considered spilling her guts to this Dr. T’Soni but decided against it. There were too many crazies out there for her to want to risk coming off as a crank by being too forthcoming.
She was so absorbed in her work that she barely registered the sound of the lab door opening.
“Dr. Chakwas. Hey. Sorry about yesterday, I…” her apology was cut off as she turned to see the half-mad doctor from Eden Prime. She also saw the glint of metal in his hand. If she hadn’t shifted in her chair to face the door, the surgical knife would have opened her throat instead of lodging in her shoulder.
Her training taking over, she slapped her uninjured hand over Dr. Manuel’s, retaining the scalpel and not letting him take another stab at something vital, then twisted her entire body, slamming him against the work table she’d been looking over. She continued twisting, wrapping his arm the wrong way around her body. A series of pops and snaps signaled that, just as her Competitive Conspiracy unarmed combat sensei had told her, Dr. Manuel’s arm had broken at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. He screamed.
Shepard kicked her chair away, she was beginning to feel clammy and blood was spurting out from around the knife. She figured she had maybe 10 seconds to reach the medigel dispenser at the far side of the med bay before she passed out. She made it maybe two thirds of the way there before collapsing, but Dr. Manuel’s screams had alerted the night crew. Ashley Williams entered the med bay, took in the blood, and immediately retrieved and applied medigel.
“He’s coming back!” Flere screamed, sounding almost hysterical. Like their namesake, they weren’t a library drone. Unlike their namesake, they weren’t a combat drone. They weren’t even armed.
Dr. Manuel emerged from the lab, his ruined arm hanging limply by his side, and retrieved the scalpel from where it had rolled when Jane passed out. He charged the two of them, managing to drive the knife into Jane’s calves and thighs several more times before Ashley drew her pistol and shot him.
Interlude 1: Emulation