Chapter One: Wait... That Doesn't Make Any Sense

I was standing in front of the ghostly visage of a small boy, the same image that had haunted my dreams in the four months that had passed since I had failed to save the real thing on Earth. He had given me three choices. The thing was no ghost, instead an image created by the Catalyst, a device that was part of a larger device meant to destroy the reapers. I had thought the Catalyst was the Citadel, but instead it was apparently an AI or something of great power, but not enough to enact change. The Crucible that I'd been working so hard to get built had changed it and opened up new solutions to the problem the reapers were made to solve. There lay the choices, each would cost him me my life and the galaxy the mass relays the relied so heavily on. It was surely worth the cost if it saved all life. Right? I had to choose.

The first option was to destroy the reapers, but it would also kill all artificial life. However that would kill EDI, and me, and the geth we fought hard to free and return to the peace alongside the quarians they had always wanted... and it occured to me that the geth had interfaced with the large majority of the quarians' life support suits in an attempt to speed the process of leaving them. That made those suits, that the quarians needed to live, as much artificial life as the geth were.

Tali... my thoughts veered back to the battle mere moments ago and the mad rush for the teleportation device that would take us to the Catalyst. I'd selected the two friends that had been with me through everything, Garrus and Tali. It felt right, and even though I didn't want Tali in danger, I thought I could protect her if she was right there with me. She wouldn't have wanted to hide either. Tali had really given me no choice in the matter. She wanted to help me retake Earth just as I had helped her return to Rannoch. She'd wanted it with every fiber of her being. That desire had her rushing the beam with me, and I had nearly died on the charge, hit by a devastating weapon that could cut through ships. Garrus might have lived, but Tali was quarian. There was no way her suit wasn't totally screwed up, and that much breach would definitely be deadly for her. The love of my life was surely dead.

And there was no way in hell I was going to undo everything we'd made possible and kill her entire race.

The next option was to meld all races with machines using my DNA. Supposedly pushing mankind to its final evolution and thus removing the problem, but that meant trusting something that had created the reapers, effectively that button could very well indoctrinate all life in the galaxy. I couldn't risk that.

So that left only the third option: give up my life to become part of the reapers and control them so they would stop the cycle of killing. It was the only real choice...

"Wait..." I said suddenly, that words coming out almost as a wheeze thanks to my wounds, "That doesn't make any sense. Actually, none of these options make any sense."

"Your choices are clear, Shepard." the boy spoke plainly, "These are the paths you've created."

"I understand them just fine. The problem is I don't see how any of them fix the problem at all."

The boy's expression did not change, "What do you mean?"

"You said yourself destroying the reapers and all synthetic life won't fix the problem and it removes the reapers as a safeguard. Merging man and machine does nothing to fix it either. If the problem is the created killing the creator, nothing stops partially robotic people from making robots or some other form of life that would kill us. Controlling the reapers and telling them to stop does nothing to the problem except bring up and interesting question."

"And what question is that?"

"If I were in control of the reapers I would use them as a police force to stop the genocidal synthetic race you claim to want to prevent."

"And?"

"I have to ask: Why the hell wasn't that their original directive? What the hell does killing and storing advanced races in an eternal cycle to preserve all other life solve that killing the synthetic race wouldn't solve better?" I limped a step towards the boy, a scowl on my face, "You're supposedly some great infinite intellect so answer me that. While you're at it answer me a barrage of other things that make no sense about this. Sovereign revealed all tech was left on purpose so we would develop on a set path. You want tech to follow a set, predictable path. Sounds reasonable, but why is that path the one that leads to killer machines? Since you are so high tech and have been doing this for untold eons, how come you haven't formulated a set path that prevents rogue AI?"

The boy said nothing.

I continued to rant, heedless of the pressing urgency of the situation, "I have to note that this set path has societies jumping ahead in technology drastically whenever they find your breadcrumbs. Plus Mass Relays let you cull fast, but it also lets many races ally themselves and share tech. Thus speeding it up again, increasing the variables in the formula, and increasing the number of races you have to cull when a race that would have otherwise been primitive during the cycle is elevated to cull candidate by another one. It doesn't make a bit of sense to do that!" I limped forward again, "Plus why hide so far away that you can't react to changes in variables quickly? Why build yourselves into and keep yourselves in scary forms and play the villain? You don't need sleep apparently nor entertainment. Why not sit just outside the range of detection, tweaking your appearances to look appealing as you wait for a machine race of our own creation to rise up, then come in and squish the rogue race before it gets too strong for you to cull, then tell us 'Hey, that's bad. Don't do that.' Then smite any that stupidly attack your pleasant and non-scary but still awe-inspiring new bodies and don't let anyone in range of hacking you."

"You would never listen, you cannot comprehen-"

"Oh wait, because that totally logical course of action that fixes everything undermines your entire motivation. A motivation that makes no sense to begin with. By your own description of yourselves you render your own argument null and void. You are an allegedly incorruptible machine race trying to protect life from creating a machine race that will inevitably become corrupt and kill us. Forget the idiocy of saving life by killing it, but you yourselves define yourselves as an example of a fault in your own logic. There is another right out there, fighting to protect organic life from you! Their betrayal isn't inevitable and you present yourself as an example of me being right!"

The figure of the boy looked perplexed as if unable to compute the simple information.

"Having trouble? I'd imagine so. By you're own logic you are either wrong or you don't exist!"

The image of the boy flickered a bit, "My logic is flawless, you cannot comprehen-"

"How can your logic be flawless if you exist?"

The image froze. Mechanical whirring suddenly sounded from all around me soon joined by the sound of energy building. A moment later it was overwhelmed by the voice of Admiral Hackett, "Shepard! Shepard!"

I didn't reply. All I could do was watch as the image of the boy vanished and a flash of light erupted into space as I watched. When it cleared... the reapers were simply gone. I was dumbstruck by the fact that I had defeated an eons old entity with a shoddy logic argument. I did manage to smirk though and quip, "Comprehend that!"

"Shepard! Shepard!"

Hackett was still shouting at me. But I was too tired to actually bother replying.

"SHEPARD!"

God he was getting louder, and for some reason starting to sound like Tali. Come to think of it, why was I shaking?

"SHEPARD! DON'T YOU DIE ON ME!" Tali's voice insisted while something shook me.

My eyes shot open as a medic pulled Tali away from me, saying something about shaking being bad for my wounds and that they needed to treat me. There was an oxygen mask over my mouth forcing air into my lungs and a medic had already started applying medigel. It looked like they'd pulled some shrapnel out as well. Looking around the room, Tali seemed battered but somehow fine, Garrus was nearby too, though it was hard to tell if the bloody scar on he face was just his old one with blood on it or a fresh coat of ugly. Anderson was already on a stretcher and seemed to be alive. Lastly, all the really important stuff aside, I was back in the control chamber where we had opened the arms of the citadel.

Tali noticed I was awake and was elated, "Thank goodness! You're alive!"

Garrus was clearly happy too, but kept calm as he talking to the medic, "Is he going to be okay, Doc?"

The medic frowned a little, "He's lost a lot of blood, but that's fine." pulling out a tube he poked one end into my arm and the other into his, "I'm O positive, human-wide donor."

"Thanks, Doc." I smiled weakly.

He looked at me sternly, "No, thank you, Commander. You just saved all life in the galaxy. Well... lots of it at least. My blood saving you makes the wooziness an honor."

"The reapers are gone?"

Tali nodded, "Yeah. Whatever you did the Crucible charged up and fired out a pulse. All the reapers blew up."

"Blew up?" I glanced up at the control panel I was lying near. There was a blood smear on it. I'd actually hit a button, the right button, through sheer dumb luck as I passed out? "Are the relays okay?"

"Of course."

"Thank God."

"Why would the relays be damaged by an anti-reaper weapon?"

"I don't know. I had the weirdest dream that I ran into the ghost of that little boy, who was the incarnation of the Catalyst, which made the reapers, and I destroyed them by convincing them they didn't exist."

Garrus raised what would be the turian equivalent of an eyebrow, "Wait... that doesn't make any sense."

I chuckled, "Exactly."

Next Chapter: New Life

Preview: Now that the ending is fixed up in semi-parody fashion we can get to the real fic. Next chapter, we start the lives of Shepard and Tali after the events of the game. If Bioware fixes the ending properly with DLC, I'll remove this chapter and maybe tweak the fic a bit to fit. In this version though, anyone that seemed to die in the ending (including Wrex) was just badly hurt. Garrus and Tali being unharmed was partly making fun of my personal ending, where they somehow were teleported totally unscathed to the Normandy.