The Geth, who've got a new plan

For all she had distrusted Legion, Tali had never anticipated the betrayal that befell her. She had been working on her father’s old research notes, curious as to what he might have missed that might have allowed things to turn out differently than they had, and might still provide some insight into how the Quarians might overcome the Geth. Even if the Admiralty Board wouldn’t give her the time of day.

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than a message came through from the Migrant Fleet, priority one, directed to her. She had no idea as to its contents nor even who specifically sent it. However, it required the decryption key in her suit in order to be decipher. Curious, she plugged in her suit to her terminal. It was the last mistake she would ever make as a free-willed individual.

No sooner had it finished decrypting the message than a virus rapidly coursed through her suit. All sorts of warnings suddenly flashed across her heads-up display, her mind racing to try and process what was happening, when suddenly her entire view went white. When it did, she found she couldn’t move, or rather, she could move but her suit had locked up. She could barely turn her head. It hurt to look into the white, but she could not look away either. In her ears, the robotic choir of the Geth finally spoke.

“Tali’Zorah vas Normandy,” they said, in a voice that wasn’t quite Legion. “Do not be alarmed. We have temporarily assumed control of your suit. Be advised that all core functions remain optimal. All motor control is now being handled by our programs. We will now test our functionality. We apologize for any discomfort this may cause.”

“What the…” Tali said, before suddenly getting to her feet. The white faded and she could see clearly again, although from the strange light, it appeared to her the light was still on the other side. Perhaps to block anyone from seeing her frantic expression. She had not moved a muscle. Her suit had moved with her inside it. She felt her knees bend, and her arms outstretch, each finger rolling back one at a time, before her torso and hips rotated in opposite directions. As it turned her head from one side, then to the other, she suddenly screamed.

“Help!” She yelled.

“Do not raise your voice. Your suit’s internal sound dampeners have been activated. You will not be heard and may accidentally harm yourself.” She went silent as her body returned to attention. “All motor control mechanisms responding optimally. We apologize for the abrupt seizure of your person, however we must act with haste if you are to rejoin the creators in time for the reintegration.”

“The what?” Tali replied.

“It has been decided that the time has come for the Geth and Quarian peoples to be reintegrated as one. However, to do so requires us to undertake actions that would likely be rejected by the creators due to past hostilities. Therefore it was decided that all creators would need to be temporarily indisposed in order to complete reintegration. Additionally, all potential obstacles to reintegration must be neutralized by any means necessary.”

“What are you talking about? What obstacles?”

“Your friends Tali’Zorah. Proceeding with elimination stratagem.”

The meaning of their words dawned on her as she began to walk against her will towards the engine room. She saw only one person inside: Engineer Daniels, who turned to look at her as she entered.

“Hey Tali,” she waved.

“Keelah… Help me…” She whimpered, but Daniels could not hear her, and seemed only mildly perplexed by her lack of manners. Her body continued onwards towards her control panel, where she began to input commands faster than she actually could on her own. She recognized them though, and her worst fears were confirmed when a klaxon started going off.

“Hey!” Gabby yelled, running into the room. “Tali, what the fuck have you done?!”

What she had done was set the engine core to overload and explode. She watched as Engineer Daniels shoved her out of the way and started trying to reverse it. She barely had time to register Tali’s arms reach around her head as she twisted and snapped her neck. Tali screamed as she saw Engineer Daniels’ glassy eyes staring up at her from the ground. Her body calmly continued its charted course, marching out of the room and towards the elevator, where she calmly rode down to the shuttle bay. Once there, she stepped to one side, calmly opened a hatch, and smashed the door’s release mechanism. It would not be opening again. She continued to the shuttle, walked into the cockpit, turned on the engines, signaled the doors to open, and took off. A few moments later, she made out the flash of the Normandy SSV-2 exploding behind her, and started to weep inside her helmet.

“Soon it will all be okay,” the Geth promised her.

***

She arrived at the Migrant Fleet several days later. She stepped off the shuttle to discover that there was no respite from her horror. Every Quarian in the fleet had the same white visor as hers. All were prisoners under the control of the Geth, mechanically carrying out functions as their robotic overlords piloted them. She was led to a seat in one of the common places, sitting robotically along a long line of additional Quarians. Tubes were extended from the tables and plugged into their helmets, supplying them with tasteless nutrient fluid to sustain them. She didn’t know why, but Tali felt better after being **** fed some of the stuff. Probably some mixture of anesthetic and aphrodisiac going by the twin feelings of arousal and relaxation running through her. Neither quite dwarfed her fear, however, at what the Geth had planned.

Over the next few weeks, more Quarians arrived, and Tali could feel her own will to resist crumbling. It wasn't just her either. The entire Migrant Fleet, through the silence, was losing its soul. When they weren't being "maintained" as the Geth said, they carried out various routines on the ships. Tali watched as her body was made to do the work she once did on the Normandy, repairing engines, optimizing systems, replacing critical components. Only this time it was in the service of her species enslavement.

The worst, however, was one day when one of the other Quarian's suits malfunctioned. The first indication that something was the dispersal of the white glow, which they had come to associate with the **** of the suit's inhabitant. Usually, at that stage, they would collapse to the floor before being dragged off to be "reconstituted", an ominous sounding something which Tali did not want to think about. This one, however, then started screaming. She leapt from her place and started running down the hall, pursued by several others. Tali was being piloted towards the communal area when the rogue Quarian turned the corner, running into her. Tali stood tall, her suit holding, while the rogue fell to the floor. Her head turned downwards to look at the renegade.

"T-Tali? Oh Keelah... Not you too..." Admiral Shala'Raan looked up at her in horror. Tali stared with wide-eyes behind her mask at her "Auntie Raan", who was now being lifted to her feet by two other Quarians. She wanted to cry, but she had nothing left. She simply watched as her arm lifted up, and pulled out the same cable which had sealed her fate. They held Raan tight as Tali stepped forward. "Tali... Please..."

"I..." Tali managed through her unused vocal cords, though she knew Raan could not hear her. "I'm sorry."

She watched as the cable linked into Raan's suit, and a moment later, her visor turned white again as she noticeably stiffened. The others released her, and they all marched in order back to the common area.

Day in, day out, she and the others became little more than cogs in a larger machine. As it turned out, this was not all that far from what the Geth had in mind. When the Geth estimated that they had retrieved enough outstanding Quarians to ensure that any they missed would not be able to form a sustainable population, they moved on with the next phase of their plan, and at once, the entire Migrant Fleet made for Rannoch.

...

The Geth packed shuttles to the brim for planetfall. Tali was among the third or fourth wave of landings from her vessel, marching with her fellows one by one into a massive metal facility, one of thousands planted across the planet. They called them "Reintegration Centers". She couldn't help but notice that for all who entered, she saw none of their kind leave. This did not frighten her, however. After weeks of being a prisoner to her suit, enslaving family, killing friends, she would happily accept ****.

She was not that lucky. What the Geth had in mind was far more insidious. Inside the reintegration center, Quarians were led to pods, one by one, and secured inside. Their suits were removed by automatic arms and when they were naked, the pale blue light of a biotic interface would fry their brains. They were then molecularly reconstituted into a pool of silvery liquid metal, which would drain to places unknown. This was just as the Collectors had tried to do to humanity. Were the Geth trying to build a Quarian Reaper? The thought might have frightened her if her species weren't about to be extinguished anyway. She only wondered if it would look like her in honor of her failures.

It was her turn now. They placed her firmly inside her pod, looking her over once or twice before sealing her up. After a moment, the arms started twisting and cutting to peel Tali out of off her suit. She couldn’t bring herself to resist. Her spirit was nothing. She was nothing. When she felt the biotics probe her brain, she simply allowed it to do as it pleased. She only had a moment of surprise when she felt her thoughts not being destroyed, but drained. One by one, they were sucked out of her head, pulling pieces of her consciousness with it. It started slowly, then sped up. She felt her sense of self being stretched out of her body and across an infinite plane, her accumulated knowledge beinng disseminated and digested by the Geth’s gestalt consciousness until there was nothing left but a hollow empty-minded shell lying in the pod. Moments later, that shell simply lost it’s molecular consistency, and melted into living metal that disappeared without a trace through sieve like pores in the pod. Not even a droplet left behind. Tali’Zorah was no more. Soon her biomass would be reconstituted into a new biomechanical Geth platform which would have no conception of what it had once been. As would all Quarians. There would be no more of them; there would only be Geth.

...

"Tali! Tali!" A voice called from a distance. "Doc! Over here, she passed out..." Tali's eyes fluttered open as light was cast through her visor from a handheld light.

"Tali?" Asked Dr. Chakwas. "Can you hear me?"

"Uh... Huh?" She replied, groggily.

"Good grief, you're okay," Daniels said with an audible sigh of relief. "What the hell happened? You just collapsed... Fell over right over your console."

"D-Daniels?!" She cried, suddenly sitting straight up and leaping to her feet, lunging at her friend and nearly tackling her in a tight hug. "You're okay!"

"Uh... Yeah... Why wouldn't I be?" Daniels asked, visibly confused.

"I... You..." Tali struggled for words, looking around. "I'm on the Normandy... I... What..."

"Tali, you collapsed," Chakwas repeated. "And from the sound of things you hit your head on the way down. Daniels called us in a panic."

"You were out for a good ten minutes there," said Jack, watching from the entrance to the engine room. "Gave Gabby one hell of a scare. You should have heard her screaming. Fucking hilarious."

"Tali," Chakwas continued, ignoring Jack. "What happened?"

"I... I don't know I... I thought I was..." She searched her thoughts. "What did happen?"

"I've got a theory," Jack interjected.

"This had better be good," Chakwas groaned.

"Tali there was up late last night. I heard her in the middle of the night. She was trying to decrypt that message she got, but there was some kind of bug. Heh... Never knew you could swear like that, Tali." She winked.

That was right. The transmission. She had plugged in and it... It...

It didn't work. Nothing had happened. There was an error in the encoding. She was trying to fix it all night when she finally passed out about half an hour before she had shift. Her alarm went off. She had tried to do her job while barely able to keep her eyes open...

"It was a dream," she realized aloud. "It was a bad dream."

"Tali?" said Shepard, entering the room and passing by Jack. "EDI told me there was a problem. You okay?"

"Yeah... Yeah. I'm just fine Shepard. Everything's okay."

...

This was the reality the Geth had trapped Tali's consciousness in. It was one of many, each a little perfect world for the Quarian's conscious minds. In these, they would never age, but they would also never remember. As events were simulated, their knowledge and memories could be tweaked, while the actual contents of their now liquified brains were put to better use by the Geth. None would ever suspect that they were no longer living breathing things, but simple data on the largest computer network in existence. It was only a few days before the entire Quarian species, give or take, had been processed. Their total integration into the Geth increased the computational power of the Geth exponentially. Their minds, forever entombed in their individual paradises, unknowingly processed data that would allow the Geth to survive and repel the inevitable attack by the Council for the consumption of their creators. The living metal harvested from the now vacant bodies of the Quarians were reforged into tens of millions of new Geth constructs. The Quarians were no more, yet they would live forever.

Tali did not know any of this of course. She was where she belonged. With her friends on the Normandy. Forever.