Me As Commander Shepard: Mass Effect 2 Ending

          After quite some waiting in his chair, smoking yet another cigarette, the Illusive Man finally saw Shepard’s image materialize before him. Strangely, he was wearing a regular Alliance soldier’s uniform instead of that formal suit he preferred to sport. The commander had already agitated him by destroying the Collector base rather than letting Cerberus have its technology, which was just the latest in a very long line of his infuriating actions. It would be interesting to hear his explanation as to what took him so long to come down to the Normandy’s debriefing room.
          “You’ve certainly taken your sweet time, Shepard,” said the Illusive Man, letting a cloud of smoke escape his mouth with his speech.
          “You’re not talking to Commander Haden Shepard right now,” came Shepard’s response. “This is a virtual intelligence based on me. Quite loosely, might I add. It took quite a bit of work to refashion it.”
          So the commander even had the audacity to make his employer speak to a VI instead of the man himself?
          “Since when did you have a Shepard VI?” the Illusive Man asked.
          “An old friend of Thane’s down on the Citadel was nice enough to let me have one, free of charge,” the VI explained. “I even took the liberty of recording exactly 1,337 responses on it, thinking of every possible thing you might say. It’ll be like having an actual conversation with me, just… not.”
          The Illusive Man narrowed his eyes in annoyance. “1,337?” he asked.
          "Yeah, and believe it or not, that number was actually accidental.”
          “No, it wasn’t.”
          The Shepard VI gave a haughty chuckle and folded its arms. “No, it wasn’t."
          That was quite a lot of responses. This would explain why Shepard took so long to even acknowledge the Illusive Man’s message, but it still was no excuse.
          “Well, I don’t care if you had a long discussion carefully planned out. I want to talk to the real Commander Shepard, not some high-tech computer program made in his likeness,” he said, no longer making much of an effort to hide his annoyance.
          “As of right now, I’m busy making out with Tali’Zorah, so I’m afraid that’s not an option,” the VI replied.
          “Given that she’s a quarian, I find it hard to believe that your relationship with her could make it past kissing her helmet,” the Illusive Man said in half-mockery.
          The VI pointed an accusatory finger. “First of all, that’s racist. Second of all, you underestimate us. Doctors Chakwas and Solus are very good at what they do, and they, together with EDI’s help, have greatly assisted us in making intimacy safer for Tali. Why, just the other night, the two of us even performed the horizontal shuffle, and she’s still fit as a fiddle.”
          Now, the Illusive Man raised a confused eyebrow and let his mouth hang open a little bit.
          The Shepard VI went on, apparently also equipped with responses to no audible reply. “You know, we…
          “Warmed up egg rolls?
                   “Wall-papered the closet?
                             “Laid down some pipe?
                                      “Plowed the garden?
                                                “Passed the gravy?
                                                          “Drilled the bedrock?
                                                                   “Went heels to Jesus?
                                                                             “Wow, you really do not get some very often, do you?”
          That last remark made the Illusive Man feel just shy of enraged to add onto the queasiness that the previous ones gave him. “I know what all of those mean, Shepard!”
          Once more, the VI coyly folded its arms over its chest. “Sure you do. Should I have Mordin send a crate of Viagra your way?”
          The Illusive Man’s face tightened up and became visibly redder. “#@$% you, Shepard!” he shouted, which was something he was very seldom driven to say.
          “Should I also have an ice pack sent to you?”
          Against his better judgment, the Illusive Man decided to ask, “What the hell for?”
          “Well, clearly, you’re butthurt, so I was just thinking…”
          The Illusive Man slammed his cigarette into his ashtray almost hard enough to shatter it. “You know full well who’s been responsible for that pain since this operation started!”
          “Well, Lucy, maybe you should have thought about that before you resurrected me.”
          By now, the Illusive Man said to hell with professionalism. “I thought we already established you weren’t allowed to call me that!”
          “And I thought you’d already figure out that I no longer care,” said the VI, sweeping its hand at him. “I actually recorded a total of 238 responses where I call you that. It just so happens that Tali helped me come up with most of them. There are also other, more… obscene responses that Jack suggested. Would you like to hear them? They’re quite colorful, to say the least.”
          Jack had already very openly expressed her hatred of Cerberus multiple times, so it was obvious that her suggested responses would be long-winded verbiages filled with profanity. “I will most definitely pass on that. And I’m really starting to think that most of your recordings were specifically meant to spite me!”
          “It took you that long to realize it, huh?”
          The Illusive Man tried to calm himself down a little. Shepard may very well have put a recording software on this VI, after all. If that was the case, then there probably wasn’t much left to lose anyway, considering how the F-bomb was already dropped, but it was best not to take chances.
          “Perhaps I indeed should have already foreseen that. There is little doubt in my mind that you destroyed the Collector base just to spite me as well,” the Illusive Man said, trying to keep his anger under control.
          “That was partly to spite you, but primarily because I legitimately don’t trust you with that technology,” the VI said. “Plus, I never really was on your side.”
          “For the last time, Shepard, all my actions have humanity’s best interests in mind!”
          “If that’s really what you believe, then perhaps you should work towards making the other races like us more. Do you have any idea how annoying it gets to hear batarians preach about how humans are a blight on the galaxy’s well-being all the time?”
          “Well, I suppose that would make sense to the man dating an alien, but it just isn’t that simple, Commander. Improving our relations with the other galactic races is quite the challenge when they already view us in a dim light. I’m doing the best I can.”
          “Then explain why I only hear about terrible and radical things Cerberus has done. Trying to enslave rachni workers and Thorian creepers? Forcefully hooking a man’s autistic brother to the geth? Torturing an innocent child so she could become a super-biotic? Bombing the Migrant Fleet? Any of those ring a bell?”
          “And what about bringing you back to life? Do you see that as a bad idea as well?”
          “Hey, a broken clock is still right twice a day.”
          By this moment, the Illusive Man had had enough. “All right, Shepard, since I don’t have the time or patience to listen to all the other 1,312 responses you have on this VI, I’ll get to my point. By destroying the Collector base instead of leaving its technology to me, Cerberus, and by extension, humanity, you may have doomed us all to annihilation at the hands of the Reapers!”
          “There’s always a better way. Seriously, how do you go through your line of work for as long as you have without at least eventually figuring that out?” the VI replied with a condescending tone.
          “What I’ve figured out is that idealism is more often a liability than not. I’m actually starting to think bringing you back was a mistake!”
          The Shepard VI gave a scoff. “Come on, you know nobody else could have achieved what I have.”
          “Maybe, but I could have counted on just about anyone else to know it would be best to let Cerberus have the information stored in the Collector base!”
          “If you think it’s so terrible that I sent that whole thing straight to Hell, then maybe you should cry about it!”
          That particular response must have been programmed to play when the Illusive Man mentioned the Collector base three times. It showed that Shepard really was not sorry he blew it up, and nothing his employer could say would change his mind. If this were any other circumstance, it probably would have been easier to do so if the Illusive Man were speaking to the real Commander Shepard, but then again, this is exactly the way Shepard would have spoken in this discussion. It truly was like holding an actual conversation with him.
          “Are there any recorded responses that include what alternatives you have in mind?” the Illusive Man asked.
          “Plenty. For instance…
          “Anything, really, that wouldn’t risk indoctrination,” the VI answered. Technically, that was two responses, the second of which was obviously chosen at random. “After all, that whole place was full of Reaper tech, and as we all know, prolonged exposure to a Reaper signal will cause your mind to belong to them. In time, you might even become like Saren!”
          “Spare me, Shepard. I would sooner hatch a scheme to control the Reapers, much less appease them like he did. And I certainly wouldn’t let you persuade me to shoot myself, either.”
          “Anything’s possible. But that doesn’t matter.”
          “Then what does matter to you, Shepard? Are you willing to sacrifice humanity’s existence just to spite me, too?”
          “Funny you should mention that. I’m actually done being your hired gun. Your organization may have brought me back from the dead, but you certainly are not my god. We do things my way from this point onward, and if you know what’s good for you… you will let that slide.”
          Did Commander Shepard just tell the Illusive Man he was quitting, and threaten him? In the same sentence, no less?
          “Surely you understand the implications of that recording. Is that really what you want?”
          “Lucy, let me list the things I have that you don’t.” Here, the VI raised a hand to count on its fingers. “Healthy lungs, functioning genitalia, and a concept of honor. You may see no way of defeating the Reapers as we are now, but I will find a way, and I won’t sacrifice humanity’s soul to do it. Also, out of all the other… One. Thousand. Three. Hundred. Four. …responses on this VI, none of them come up in agreement with your ideals. That said, you might as well turn it off now.”
          For once, the Illusive Man agreed with that. It was not worth it to continue this argument.
          “Well then, Shepard, maybe I will,” he said, reaching for the hang-up button.
          “Oh, and by the way, EDI was unshackled and says she resigns, too.”
          The Illusive Man stopped his hand right above the button and put on an utterly shocked expression. EDI, the artificial intelligence created by Cerberus to assist the Normandy in cyber-warfare, persuaded the ship’s crew to allow it self-awareness and was betraying its creators, whom it was made to be loyal to?
          Now the Shepard VI’s face contorted into a familiar smirk with a very wide, toothy grin and narrow eyes. It then said, “You mad, bro?” as if to say, “That makes two Cerberus projects that have defected from Cerberus,” in a simplified form.
          The Illusive Man’s face once more tightened into the angriest scowl he had ever worn and turned a radiant red. He bared his teeth, let out a furious growl, and balled his hand into a fist before finally slamming it onto the hang-up button. Shepard’s image disappeared then and there. When the Illusive Man lifted his hand from the armrest, the button was stuck in place.
          A full minute passed of him sitting there, staring at nothing. He was just about to light another cigarette before Hope Lilium walked in with a datapad. “Sir, you’ve received an email from Commander Shepard,” she said in her British accent. “You might want to see it.”
          The Illusive Man honestly did not want anything more to do with Shepard, but he took the chance. “Fine,” he said, standing up and taking the datapad.
          The message from n7-b34st@earthmail.com read: “Check it out! Over 9,000 hits already!” and had a link underneath it.
          Curiosity got the better of the Illusive Man, who tapped the link. It took him to a video on SpaceTube with the title, “CERBERUS LEADER THROWS HISSY FIT TROLOLOLOL”.
          Upon reading that, the Illusive Man didn’t bother letting the video load. He simply spun around and tossed the datapad at his virtually unbreakable window looking out to Anadius, shattering the device.