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They have a dehydrated, asphyxiated brain and barely enough extraneous tissue to fit on an electron microscope slide, let alone reconstruct Commander Shepard’s DNA sequence.
Miranda would be lying if she said she’d done more with less.
Earn your freedom.
They expect perfection and she will be perfect. The Lazarus Project will be nothing short of a resounding success.
It takes them two and a half months for the ECG to record any brain activity, which is about a month and a half longer than Miranda wanted or expected it to take but she refuses to rush anything, triple-checking every calculation herself. Everything will go exactly according to plan, if not on the time table she had originally sketched out.
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
There are occasional blips on the machine, anomalies that, while within the standard deviation, make her nervous which, in turn, makes her push her team harder. Calculations are quadruple-checked, every experiment is done 5 times before anyone is allowed near one of the precious remaining cells of Commander Shepard’s tissue.
Her internal organs are complete.
The anomalous blips are still there.
The machines have been recalibrated every day for three weeks and comparative scans have been done on every single person in the Lazarus Cell. She’s on the verge of tearing out her hair. In a fit of sleep-deprived inspiration, she hacks into the Alliance medical database, locates Commander Shepard’s files, and runs a decryption algorithm while she takes a 15-minute nap. When she comes back, she runs a comparison algorithm on the two sets of files.
99.987% match.
She allows herself to relax minutely as she pours herself another cup of coffee.
They’ve harvested a set of regrown skin and muscles, the surgeons rebuilding Commander Shepard piece by piece over the course of the next month. She watches them like a hawk on a monitor in her work station, one eye on the medbay and one eye on everything else.
The first one appears after they reattach Commander Shepard’s right arm.
She freezes, eyes locked on the screen.
What is that?
She zooms in and waits.
There it is again. A faint twitch of Commander Shepard’s fingers.
A few seconds later, her arm muscles tense and relax.
Miranda feels her entire body go cold.
She has nightmares about them. The jerking, the tensing, the twitching.
She wakes up in the middle of the night and her arm muscles feel fatigued, as if they’ve been tensing in her sleep.
Fix it.
She pulls herself out of bed, drinks another cup of coffee, and settles back down at her computer.
The twitches are in every single one of Commander Shepard’s limbs, in her neck, on her face.
Miranda spends days redoing every calculation, rereading every detail of every document of every experiment they’ve done, searching for the mistake until her eyes go blurry and she can barely hold her head up.
She never finds one but it must be there, it must because there are these damnable twitches—
Miranda, you fool. You useless idiot.
She pulls up the ECG readout on one screen and the live feed of Commander Shepard on the other.
The twitches and the anomalous blips match up.
But what does it mean?
“I believe Commander Shepard is dangerous and unstable,” she tells the Illusive Man in her next report. “She has actively worked against Cerberus in the past and there is no guarantee of future cooperation. I propose implanting her with a chip in order to—control her and curb any…undesirable urges she might feel the need to act upon.”
“It’s exactly these urges and instability that make her so valuable to us.” A wisp of smoke curls up from the end of his lit cigarette, the tiny glow all but drowned out by the light of the dying star behind him. He looks directly at her with his cybernetic eyes, the blue glow no doubt unnerving to a lesser human. “I need a 100% guarantee this won’t negatively impact her abilities.”
“Sir, the benefits far outweigh—”
“A 100% guarantee, Operative Lawson.”
“Sir—”
“Can you give me that?”
“…No, I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Then my answer is no.”
She bites her tongue, putting her temper into a box. Throwing the brain scans and videos in his face won’t do anyone any good. He doesn’t need to know about her (many) shortcomings.
Try harder. Do better. Be perfect.
They’re approaching the end of the second quarter of year two when she gives the order to contact Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau.
This is a mistake. Her commitment to Cerberus will already be weak.
She keeps these thoughts to herself.
“Wh-what do I say?” the nervous-looking young psychologist asks her.
The only snarl she makes is the one inside her head, but her displeasure is clear when she practically snaps at him.
“Figure. It. Out.” She doesn’t want anything to do with this part of the project.
“Y-yes, ma’am.”
It takes the entire team of shivering psychologists to work up the nerve to tell her their first two attempts to contact Moreau failed.
“He didn’t even open it!”
“Show me what you sent him.”
She keeps her face carefully smooth as she reads the sloppily-phrased missive while inside she rages.
No encryption, a clear description of everything we’re doing… I’m surprised they didn’t include our location as well, just to make things easier for anyone who might want to finish us or Commander Shepard once and for all.
She takes a deep, calming breath. The psychologists look at each other anxiously.
“Imagine, for a moment, that you are Mr. Moreau. You have spent over a year with Commander Shepard rescuing the galaxy and occasionally responding to local distress calls like the Alliance’s personal maid. Does anyone know the cause of these distress calls?”
“Aliens?” one psychologist volunteers.
She pins them with a cold look.
“Us,” a second one whispers.
“No, not us. We are effective. We get results. They were Cerberus cells that were deactivated because of incompetence.” She looks each psychologist in the eye, making it very clear that they might share that fate if they fail her again.
They flee back down the hall.
They return to her with another failure.
“He—he closed it too quickly to have read the entire message.”
She sends them away with cold words and a colder glare.
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
The second she enters her room, her biotic corona flares and she sends three chairs crashing into the wall. They don’t break—she’s too controlled for that—but there is an ominous creaking noise.
She rights the chairs, settles herself into one of them, and sets herself to the task of writing a message that would be impossible for Mr. Moreau to ignore, even in the light of the three previous failures.
He asks her for proof. Of course he does.
She takes a video and a picture, zooming in to leave out as many of the facilities structural details as possible. She also turns off the sound, which turns out to be a good thing, as Commander Shepard twitches every time, no matter how videos she takes, causing her to curse.
What are you going to do if he asks about that?
Surprisingly, he doesn’t. When her omnitool pings, the only thing sitting in her inbox is an empty message with the subject line I’m in
She looks at the monitor where the video feed from the medbay is still displayed and frowns.
As if the woman is mocking her, Commander Shepard’s arm twitches again.