Shepard takes stock of her surroundings and realises she's just outside another observation room, or something like it, judging by the contents she spies through the wide window. She ventures inside with caution and, more than anything, a gnawing curiosity. Like the observation room before, the information here relates to biology and technology—the marriage between the two. Unlike the previous room, however, the sketches are neat and precise, and any notes written on paper, although rare, are written in a fluid, graceful hand. Without Miranda to keep her in check, Shepard finds herself snooping into the records buried within the terminals.

She quickly realises it's beyond her scope, but she does notice patterns. All the notes pertain to something called the "Lazarus Project", an effort to resurrect a single patient. She does some more sleuthing and holograms of the female human body pop up, but it's heavily modified with tech. She recognises some of it as related to biotics such as implants, but there are some things she has no understanding of at all, just like what she saw in the previous observation room. It's bizarre.

And then she stumbles upon logs. When she opens the folders, she finds that there are too many logs to count. Years worth of them. It has to be. She could scroll forever and never reach the bottom, it seems. In the face of such a wealth of data, she selects a single log at random and presses play.

Miranda's face pops up on the screen

"Progress is slow, but the subject shows signs of recovery. Major organs are once again functional, and there are signs of rudimentary neurological activity.

"In an effort to accelerate the process, we've moved from simple organic reconstruction of the subject to bio-synthetic fusion. Initial results show promise."

Shepard thinks back to the hologram she found earlier, realising it must have been the patient. Curious, she searches the terminal again, looking for a later log, and selects one at random once more.

Again, Miranda takes up the screen.

"Physical reconstruction of subject is complete, but we still need to evaluate all mental and neurological functions. Our orders were clear: make Commander Shepard who she was before the attack—the same mind, the same morals, the same personality.

"If we alter her identity in any way, if she's somehow not the woman she used to be, the Lazarus Project will have failed. I refuse to let that happen."

The log ends and Shepard frowns. She can't have heard that correctly. She goes back to the list of logs again, replaying the same one. She listens as Miranda says her name again and again, but she shakes her head like some dumb animal who is unable to process the information it's been confronted with.

But she steps back and looks at her reflection in the white tiles of the wall and the reality sinks in. The scars that disfigure her face—her entire body—they're not normal. They follow the asymmetry of her face and figure with surgical precision, as though the skin has intentionally been cut and patched together again. And they're golden. Glowing with the gentlest light. Nothing about her feels natural, she realises. She feels heavy and... suddenly rotten inside.

She doesn't know how to react. She's winded, but she's... angry. She wants to throw her fists against a wall, but her confusion steals the fire from her heart. More than anything, she just feels lost.

She's almost afraid to delve deeper, but her curiosity is insatiable. She keeps searching for answers, even though the act feeds the growing dread within her. This time she scrolls down to an earlier log, but she hesitates before playing it. She's not sure she can stand to see Miranda be so... clinical about something some people would go as far as to call a heresy. She can barely stand to think about how she's a product of something so heinous. But, against her better judgement, she presses play.

"The test subject has been recovered, but the damage is worse than we feared. In addition to injuries from the explosion, the subject has suffered greater than expected cellular degradation due to poor storage of the body. It's likely that it wasn't in refrigera—"

Shepard smashes the pause button. She doesn't want to hear that she's been treated like a piece of meat. She doesn't want to be referred to as a dead body. Her skin begins to crawl the longer she thinks about it. As if her body can sense the rot within her—its unnatural existence. She wonders why the Alliance would even do this.

But she hasn't actually seen a standard Alliance uniform yet. Of any variety—no admiral or captain variants. No engineers. The standard colour is navy blue, but all these people are wearing black uniforms. And the symbols on the walls—they're not Alliance at all.

Who are these people?

She moves away from the terminal and looks around the room again. The walls are covered in X-ray images—an image of a shattered hip, a fractured femur, and fractured finger bones. There are MRI images, too, not that she knows how to read them, but she knows broken bones when she sees them. She goes to yet another terminal to find it full of image files. Again, she feels a growing dread, but she pushes the feeling aside as she selects one anyway.

She's so shocked by what she sees that she jumps back, but she can't rip her eyes away. It's definitely her, but she looks so... dead. Her naked body is lain across a metal slab, every injury on show, her discoloured, blotchy skin marred with marks and scars and crusted blood—wounds that were never supposed to heal. Her hip is sunken in, her left leg bruised almost all across the thigh. No one could survive a bleed like that... not even her.

"How could this happen?" she whispers.

She wracks her mind for the memories, and they do come to her, but they're so fragmented. She remembers that the ship was in trouble. There was damage on the crew deck and she was pushing someone away. She had something important to do...

The dream. That dream she was having when Miranda woke her wasn't a dream at all. It was real. She had to save Joker. Her heart sinks as she realises the gravity of the situation. The Normandy was destroyed, and she was the last living soul on board by the time the last escape pod left. She doesn't know how many of her crew survived. She needs to get back to them.

She leans against the desk to steady herself after her sudden realisation, but her fingers slip and accidentally activate one of the more recent audio logs from the terminal.

"Log Update: The cost of this project is astronomical—over four billion credits so far. But nobody seems to care that we've gone over budget.

"I don't know where the boss gets all his money... maybe it's better not to know. I just wish he'd kick a little more in my direction once in a while."

Shepard recognises the voice as Wilson. The man whom Miranda was chiding for his miscalculations. He sounds incredibly bitter, judging by the tone, but that's not what catches Shepard off-guard.

"Four billion credits?" she mutters. She shakes her head as her brow crinkles in confusion. "No one's worth that much." With renewed interest, she checks more of the logs. Selecting one and pressing play.

"Log Update: I can't figure Miranda out. As a project director, she should be ecstatic at all the progress we've made. But she's still the same old ice queen. Maybe she's worried Shepard might become the new favourite. Or maybe she's just a pure, cold-hearted bitch."

"Whose favourite!" Shepard hisses. She's only finding Wilson's bitching instead of the answers she's looking for. She throws her hands up in defeat and decides she's wasted enough time, leaving the room and all its soul-shattering revelations behind.

But she doesn't know where to go. Presented with a bifurcation in her path, she picks the one on the left, hoping that the one she's chosen will take her where she needs to go. She takes the steps up to a floor where the remnants of a battle lie strewn across the floor—mechs and bodies both. She can still hear the sounds of a battle that rages farther ahead though, muffled by the closed doors. She readies her pistol as she advances on them, but without Miranda, they don't open. She tries to hack them but only realises that she doesn't have her omnitool.

She's not sure how to proceed for a moment, but then she remembers her new-found ridiculous biotic power. She moves back through the hall and readies herself, erecting a barrier and entering the stance every vanguard worth their salt has practiced a thousand times. Her biotic aura completely envelops her, rippling across her entire body and sweeping her loose, floating hair in a way so foreign to her that she lingers in the feeling for a little while before she charges for the door.

Her teeth threaten to shatter under the force of the collision, the doors flying forward as their metal warps and buckles under the astounding force. They come to a clamorous stop at the other end of the small room and she steps inside, her aura and barrier still shining like a second sun.

"What the hell!"

Shepard turns to find a dark-skinned man crouched by a railing separating him from a cavernous fall, and farther beyond, a group of mechs. They begin to shoot at Shepard, but the bullets are deflected by her barrier which barely ripples from the lame assault.

"Wait, Shepard?" he says, and she runs to his side to take cover. "What are you doing here? I thought you were still a work in progress."

At first she's shocked by how blase he seems as he says the words, then she looks at her scars bitterly and says, "It sure as hell looks that way, though you could be a little less crude about it."

"Yeah... sorry. I forgot this is all new to you."

"I don't care for apologies. I want a name, and I want answers. What the hell are you people doing here?"

"The name's Jacob Taylor, ma'am. I—" he ducks his head as the mechs renew their assault, then says, "I can answer your questions after we deal with the mechs."

Shepard rises out of cover and holds out her arms, pulling on the row of mechs and drawing them out into the cavernous drop with her biotics, before letting them fall. She looks back at Jacob who slowly comes out of cover, surprised at Shepard's show of force.

He looks her over and says, "Looks like your biotics are working just fine."

"More than 'just fine.' You've done something to me, but what?"

"You... died. The short story is that we brought you back, Commander." He puts his hands up and says, "Not me, specifically. I'm just a soldier. It was the scientists who spent two years rebuilding you. We call it the 'Lazarus Project.'"

"Two years?"

"Yeah. Faster than expected, actually."

Shepard's face twists into a disgusted scowl as she shakes her head. "How the hell did they do it?"

"Cutting-edge technology, but you'd have to ask the scientists about the details."

"It looks like they're all dead. Miranda wouldn't let me help them."

Jacob's eyebrows shoot up. "You were talking to Miranda?"

Shepard nods. "We lost contact, though. She was leading me to the shuttle bay."

"Hmm. Miranda's tough... but I still worry," Jacob says, shaking his head softly. "Nothing we can do now, though. C'mon, I'll lead you to the shuttle bay." Jacob turns his back on Shepard and heads for the door.

"Wait."
Jacob turns around, an expectant look in his deep brown eyes as he looks back at Shepard. Her eyes drop to the symbol emblazoned on his chest. That hexagon, again, but this time it's in colour. Both white and yellow against the black of his undersuit, a sleek second skin that shows off the body of a soldier; he's a weapon hewn from bone and muscle.

"You called me ma'am earlier. Said you were a soldier, too. Do you serve in the Alliance?"

Jacob's lips part, but he hesitates before speaking.

"I used to."

They share a tense moment of silence before Jacob beckons for her to follow. "Come on. We need to get out before we're overrun by mechs."

"Check. Check. Anyone on this frequency? Anybody still alive out there? Hello?"

"Wilson?" Jacob says, raising a hand to his ear. "This is Jacob. I'm here with Commander Shepard. Just took out a wave of mechs over in D wing."

"Shepard's alive? How the hell... nevermind. You need to get her out of there. Get to the service tunnels and head for the network control room."

"Roger that, Wilson. Stay on this frequency," Jacob says. Again, he gestures for Shepard to follow him.

"C'mon, the service tunnels are this way."