Yeah--we don't know how they did what they did to the Protheans. The base might have been designed to do it, and by the time the researchers find that out it might already be too late. Maybe it's there to prime organic beings for mental dominance by Reapers, a sort of incubator for their future slaves' minds.Hopefire wrote...
-The base could have been created to serve as a giant processing plant, and part of what it processes is sentient beings. Beyond to turn them into Reapers, that is. The base might be designed to convert a sentient race into a client slave race.
The Illusive Man didn't sound like someone who would proceed with incredible caution and care. He seemed like a man possessed, a man driven by fear and the knowledge that no other organization in the galaxy is doing anything about the greatest threat organic life has ever, ever known.
I can't blame him for his emotions--he's the proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the blind--but knowing what Shepard has known... seeing what she's seen... even though he's intelligent and astute, he hasn't been in the field enough to know what he was dealing with. He wasn't out there fighting husks. He didn't speak with Saren or the indoctrinated salarians. He didn't find the many groups of researchers decimated and maddened by mere proximity to Reaper tech. It's addictive, alluring, and subtle. Who knows how those "sleeper agents" Vigil spoke of were made? The ones who infiltrated groups of their own kind, convincingly, and then "betrayed them to the machines"?
He wasn't there on that derelict Reaper to see the destruction that simply being on an inactive, eons-dead Reaper ship had caused. And he did not sound reasonable. And he commanded Miranda to stop me before turning back to stridently plead his case again. He sounded as if the question he was asking himself for so long, can we really win this war, was starting to get to him.
If he were really holding on to his sanity and being as responsible and cautious as is necessary in the face of epic horror, he would have been reasoning with me. Asking me why I believed it was a bad idea, trying to discuss the matter and showing a bit of trust in Shepard's judgment rather than acting as he did.
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait--did I just read you saying there is NO EVIDENCE that the base can indoctrinate without its Reaper host? How about Harbinger's remote possessions? How about the derelict Reaper, eons-dead but STILL ticking, STILL making twisted servants out of researchers? That's not proof, but it's certainly evidence.Psython wrote...
There is no evidence that the base
can indoctrinate without its reaper host.
...
The moral duty to save all life is
worth the risk. I think there is more of a chance that more people will
die without the base than with. Its either elimination by the reapers
or elimination by base we are facing, but by saving the base there is a
greater chance for sucess also.
...
Desperate times call for desperate
measures. Stopping the reapers means making tough decisions and not
getting bogged down in moralizing. Besides, there is no such thing as
right or wrong anyways, its all relative.
The "moral duty" to save all life... would getting the entire galaxy indoctrinated be saving all life? That's the strong possibility you're looking at. It again comes down to what you thinking save all life is--is it saving the actual physical bodies even if they end up like the Collectors? I certainly don't think that's a future worth "saving." I think Saren was wrong about slavery and brainwashing being preservation of any kind.
You say you are not about getting bogged down in moralizing and there's no such thing as right or wrong, when just a short ways before that you said "moral duty to save all life." That's not really working out, man.
"Making the tough decision" is what I call destroying a piece of tech that might be useful because the risks outweigh the benefits. It's not "getting bogged down in moralizing" to say that it's too damned dangerous and pointless to throw away brilliant minds on a death trap made by beings thousands of times more sophisticated than your own brain will ever be. Like a child messing with Dad's rocket launcher, you don't know what you're dealing with just because you've handled a bb gun before.
Your worst case scenario is weak. Here's a real worst case scenario. The Reapers manage to use the base to transform the researchers into indoctrinated sleeper agents, or agents of Saren's ilk--not husks but intelligent beings with their memories, personalities, bodies and minds mostly intact, who managed to be as convincing to the rest of the galaxy as Saren was in your meeting with the Council. They infiltrate all of galactic society and invisibly prepare it for the invasion. By the time we're ready to use the Reaper tech against them, overconfident and falsely secure in the knowledge that we can really win now, they have taken out all our communications systems and dismantled the best of our own tech through the use of their agents, and by the time we realize they've gutted all our defenses it's too late to do anything but scream in futile agony as they tear us apart.
There's your real worst case scenario and that is why this is such a hard question to answer. Because the risks of the tech are incredibly large--they may pay off in a crucial way, or they may bring unnecessary destruction and ruin all your chances.
That's a fascinating statement. I think you might well be right about that.ziggehunderslash wrote...
I believe the reason they were
making a human Reaper was due to something Legion says. Using Reaper
technology, the mass effect generators and the Citadel is the entire
basis of the Reaper plan, forcing technological evolution down
pre-defined paths. While not something left for that purpose, it is
based on the same sets of technology.
...
the endgame Big Bad was, I feel, an
attempt to combat this threat by recreating the capacity in one of
their own.
I think it's also interesting to note that the Protheans were destroyed just about the time they had almost unlocked the secret of mass relay technology. The same thing seemed to be happening to the current civilization; there's that asari bartender who ended up on Ilium because she had said they should be studying mass relay tech. Could the emergence of human species and those leaps you were talking about be the reason that Sovereign decided it was time to wipe out organic life again? I wonder if they feared organic life finding the Collector base, or whether something about mass relay technology has been the key to destroying them all along...
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