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The “EDI and Geth survive the Destroy Ending” manifesto

The goodies dropped on N7 Day of 2021 told a contradictory story:

On one hand, you had a cinematic video of Liara climbing a dead Reaper, which would indicate that the canon ending for ME3 was the Destroy ending, with at least one other dead Reaper in the background.

On the other hand, you had a poster released in which several figures were approaching a crater that resembled a Geth's head. Since the Geth (and EDI) are supposedly wiped out along with the Reapers in the event of the Destroy ending, these two things shouldn't be able to co-exist.

Then came N7Day 2022, which (when unscrambled) seems to have audio of Liara talking to some Geth. Again, this is in contradiction to the notion of Liara climbing a dead Reaper.

I've spent the last year trying to resolve this contradiction, and I believe there's a solid foundation for believing the Geth and EDI COULD survive the destroy ending, and that Shepard is mislead by the Catalyst when told Geth and EDI would also be destroyed if Shepard chooses that option.

These are my conclusions. (dun-dun.)

Caveat Emptor: This manifesto is way past the point of relevancy to most fans of the franchise, I’m sure, and it’s quite possible someone has opined on this subject before me. But I’m a latecomer to Mass Effect and if that’s the case, I haven’t seen it. Pardon any lack of originality.

Furthermore, I have nothing more than a layman’s grasp of astro- and nuclear physics, and maybe a smidge better understanding of computer networking. I’ve got perhaps a journeyman’s knowledge of coding, in that I’ve taught myself enough to write a couple libraries to use as dependencies for apps I hoped to develop someday.

Finally, I have not read the Mass Effect books or comics. If these issues are addressed therein, I will have missed it. I probably have also missed a lot of Word of God input from the creators, as I don't follow them religiously.

Let's proceed....

Watching a playthrough of someone else’s Mass Effect game recently brought back a lot of thoughts I’ve had about the Destroy ending, and the supposed destruction of EDI and the Geth alongside the Reapers. And I call bullshit.

Again, I’m sure that’s not a revelation; as beloved as EDI and Legion are, many, many people have declared that ending bullshit. But I come with receipts! Nearly every point I make from here on out is backed by canonical evidence in game. Sometimes that evidence is dependent upon Shepard leaning toward a particular morality. Beyond that, any supposition or assumption I make is clearly disclaimed as such and has at least a significant portion of the underlying rationale supported by in-game statements or events.

Before I begin, I will clarify that yes, I am aware of the Indoctrination Theory and have watched a number of videos about it, including the originals. While I’m not positive I believe the entire thing, because some of it felt like reaching (which I may be guilty of myself, herein) there are parts of it that make a great deal of sense to me and have no doubt influenced my thinking. As such, there may be some overlap between my theories and theirs.

PART ONE: The interoperability of EDI, the Geth, and the Reapers

Three disparate programming languages

As EDI herself points out when comparing her independent intelligence to the Geth’s networked intelligence, EDI and the Geth are two very different forms of AI. To wit, until after (and if) they survive Priority: Rannoch, the Geth aren’t “true,” fully-evolved AIs. We have multiple sources confirming this, most notably Admiral Shala Raan and Legion leading up to the final battle for Rannoch.

The Geth possess self-awareness, but can only function independently at a limited intellectual capability. Unless multiple Geth are networked together (such as Legion) they are really closer to VIs, except that they still possess rudimentary self-awareness.

EDI, the Geth, and the Reapers were created–by which I mean coded, since, as Legion points out, they exist purely as software–by different races and at different times. While the essence of any programming ultimately comes down to the ones and zeros (i.e. which bits are “on” and which bits are “off”), regardless of the coding language, it’s probable that EDI, the Geth, and the Reapers were all written in vastly different languages. IIRC, the Prothean designs for the Crucible are in base-12 math. Most likely, the math underlying the programming of each of these three different AIs varies one from the other at least that much or more.

For example: Quarians only have three fingers on each hand. So is their elementary level math in base-10 like ours, or base-6, which would account for their total number of fingers and therefore their most primitive tool for counting? And we’ve seen the Leviathan race that created the Catalyst. How did they learn to count in the primitive stage of their evolution? What is their mathematics–and thus, the base language of all their technology–built upon?

It’s possible the language in which EDI’s software was written may have been influenced by technology picked up from other races in the 30 years since First Contact. It’s also possible that the programming languages of those races may have been influenced by the quarians’ programming languages of a few centuries ago. If both of those conditions are true, it would give EDI and the Geth a minuscule chance of “out-of-the-box” interoperability.

It is also possible that the languages in which EDI and the Geth were written were, to some extent, derived from or influenced by the technological advances that came with discovering “Prothean” ruins and acquiring mass effect technology, which of course originated with the Catalyst and the Reapers. That allows for a minute chance that there is some limited interoperability between all three. But like any other language, programming evolves, or at least branches. The languages EDI and the Geth were written in may or may not be backward compatible with Reaper code, but it seems unlikely.

We don’t know when the quarians discovered mass effect technology, but we know it was long enough ago for them to be able to escape via the relays when fleeing Rannoch nearly three centuries prior to Mass Effect. It’s likely the Geth were created using quarian programming languages that are more than a century or two of evolution past the first influence of “Prothean” (i.e. Reaper) technology.

In other words, there isn’t much chance of out-of-the-box interoperability between these three kinds of software.

Remember that embarrassing snafu with one of the early Mars rover projects a couple decades ago, where the project almost entirely failed because someone assumed they were working with the English measurement system rather than metric, or vice versa? Yeah. It’s kinda like that. Precision in these matters is really rather important, and usually a little precision is lost each time one system is converted to another for compatibility.

EDI and Reaper tech

EDI herself, Shepard points out, incorporates “Reaper technology”, as no doubt does EVA’s platform that EDI commandeers. This would suggest that EDI has a greater chance of interoperability with the Reapers than she does with the Geth.

But we’re never told exactly what “Reaper technology” means. Does it mean she was written in Reaper code? Does it mean Reaper hardware was incorporated into her physical design, i.e. her hardware in the medical bay AI core and throughout Normandy? And to what degree? What portion of EDI is Alliance tech from the training facility on Luna in ME1, what portion of it is the other AI on the Citadel in ME1 (the jury is out as to whether that was included in material salvaged from the Citadel), and what portion was based upon Sovereign?

I find the notion of incorporating actual Reaper hardware into EDI’s design unlikely, as doing so might pose a hazard of indoctrination to the crew of the Normandy SR2. We’re not sure anyone knows how capable of indoctrinating people pieces of a DEAD Reaper can be until the Derelict Reaper mission in ME2, and no doubt The Illusive Man would certainly have considered it, but as far as we’re ever aware, no one on Normandy ends up indoctrinated (with the exception of Shepard under the Indoctrination Theory). Therefore, I’m going to discount the possibility of Reaper hardware being integrated into EDI’s platforms.

That leaves software. In which case, we have to ask ourselves, how much software would Cerberus be able to derive from the remnants of Sovereign?

Sovereign is a fully functional, independent, and self aware platform. Like Geth ships, it doesn’t need pilots and engineers and operators to keep it functional. We don’t even have proof of it having any caretakers, like the Keepers on the Citadel. Therefore one may surmise that user interface components on Sovereign would be minimal. Indeed, in the derelict Reaper, almost all the interfaces were ones the Cerberus science team installed.

I’d also call it improbable that Sovereign has anything along the lines of an AI core, because a) since Sovereign doesn’t need a crew for maintenance, there’s no incentive to keep the hardware centralized and accessible, and b) such a configuration would create a massive point of vulnerability where a lucky shot could take out most, if not all, of Sovereign’s processing power in one hit.

Conveniently for Cerberus, that probably also means Sovereign’s processing power isn’t contained in an AI core the size of Normandy herself (if not larger) which could prove problematic for secretly hauling it away.

So how is it designed? I can see two possibilities.

The first is that it has multiple, smaller processing nodes throughout its physical platform, similar to the way EDI says many of her processes are distributed throughout Normandy (though she still does have an AI core as well.)

The second is that those components all comprise the ship itself. There’s no reason to believe their hardware bears any resemblance to ours, even futuristic as ours is in Mass Effect.

The Catalyst–and therefore the Reapers–might not possess any notions about needing to build processors and memory storage as separate units and shield them inside an external casing. Without more data to say for sure, it’s every bit as likely that Sovereign’s processing and memory components are part and parcel of the shell and inner architecture of the ship itself, with most or every surface being the Reaper equivalent of a circuit board and/or data storage unit. This could certainly explain how the human proto-Reaper in the Collector base was already so functional when it was merely at an “embryonic” stage of its development.

If the nodes model applies, since we’re discussing a “ship” twice the size of a skyscraper, each of those nodes would still likely be quite massive and not easy to move, much less slip out from under the nose of C-Sec and the Council and the Council races’ in the aftermath of the Battle of the Citadel.

The “every piece is a functional piece of processing and storage hardware” theory makes portability less of an issue, since any piece, however small, may contain fragments of Reaper code.

But even then, how would Cerberus identify which pieces of salvage are memory or processing units? How would they know what that looks like?

Are we to believe that Cerberus managed to:

Extract enough salvaged pieces to determine which contained code that they could analyze and build from

Engineer a way to interface with those components

Decompile and decipher the code stored in those components

Wrap that code in something closer to our own languages so that

interoperability is possible, the way a C++ library may need, say, an Objective-C wrapper to be used in Swift.

in less than two years, and STILL have enough time to develop an AI as fully-featured and functional as EDI?

Cerberus, being a human-supremacist organization, might have borrowed from what advanced technology the Alliance had acquired from Prothean ruins and the other races, but it wouldn’t have involved alien scientists with hundreds or thousands more years of experience in working with the advanced technology we only just recently acquired.

The Geth and the Reaper code upgrades

Until ME3, there is no indication that the Geth incorporate Reaper technology in any form. The Heretics chose to worship the Reapers; they were not influenced by Sovereign reprogramming them. “A House Divided” is quite clear on this point: the Heretics came to a conclusion and followed it, full stop.

When the Geth actually DID integrate Reaper code, doing so merely enhanced the Geth’s abilities enough to enable them to function as fully evolved intelligences even when operating independently.

We get a bit of a contradiction at this point: on one hand, the Geth Server mission on Rannoch indicates that with the server cleansed of Reaper code, the Geth stored in the server will be lost. As Shepard says, it’s like wiping out a whole city. Taking the server offline also causes the Geth forces in space to go into a state of dormancy. They stop fighting the quarians and just hang there in space. But it does not seem to “kill” them. Legion asks Shepard if the Geth deserve to die just for defending themselves, suggesting that they’re not going to actually be “dead” until the quarians attack and destroy them.

I’m not entirely sure how to reconcile those two notions. Why did removing the Reaper code destroy the programs on the Geth server, but only knock out the ships and fighters in space? For lack of any better explanation, I consider it to be a plot hole. As such, I feel perfectly free to patch it in whatever way best supports my own preferences and agenda, which is to “save” EDI and the Geth in the Destroy ending.

Therefore, I’m going to hypothesize that removing the Reaper upgrades does not “kill” the Geth that aren’t directly networked in an affected server. The geth operating on mobile platforms can still function without the upgrades, but it will take longer for them to return to functionality because they need to be…rebooted? Perform a factory reset? Whatever.

Once rebooted, however, the Geth would only have the same functionality that they had BEFORE the Reaper upgrades. They would still have self-awareness, but reduced independent intelligence.

✴️TL;DR: Conclusion #1 We may safely conclude that whatever Reaper technology is integrated with EDI, her overall functionality does not depend upon it. Likely, it’s limited to being able to interface with Reaper tech, such as the Reaper IFF. And even that took at least a day or two to integrate. Possibly more, depending on when you played the Derelict Reaper mission and whether you had other other missions besides “A House Divided” to complete before the attack on Normandy triggered.

Furthermore, given textual clues, it seems probable that the Geth could return to some lesser degree of functionality after recovering from the removal of the Reaper upgrades.

PART TWO: How much of what the Catalyst tells Shepard is true?

When questioned about how EDI got the ship and Joker free of Alliance control when the Reapers attacked earth, EDI tells Shepard that she lied while posing as a V.I.. When questioned about this, EDI confirms that she has no programming constraints requiring her to provide accurate data.

If we extrapolate to assume that, similarly, the Catalyst surely has no safeguards against deception in its programming–how else could the Catalyst have done what it did to turn on its creators? How else could the Reapers be able to indoctrinate people into believing something that isn’t true?– everything it tells Shepard becomes suspect.

EDI also tells us that she has self-preservation priorities, and we see her choose to modify them. We can assume that, likewise, the Reapers–or more specifically, the Catalyst–values its own continued existence, and unlike EDI, it has no overriding priorities (such as Joker, whom she states she would risk non-functionality for.) Given that assumption, the Catalyst has motive to do everything in its power to induce Shepard to refuse the Destroy option.

Including lying to Shepard.

The Reapers–and thus the Catalyst–know Shepard. They know that Shepard (or at least, iterations of Shepard that haven’t let the Geth die) values synthetic life. They know a peacemaker Shepard would consider sacrificing his/her/their own life preferable to sacrificing beings Shepard values. Depending on the choices Shepard has made, the Catalyst might also know that Shepard is anti-genocide.

Therefore, the Catalyst might conclude that if it presents Shepard with three choices–one of which involves being responsible for the genocide of not one, not two, but THREE unique synthetic races (EDI being a race unto herself, as the only one of her kind) and the others which only require Shepard to sacrifice their self, there’s a significant chance that Shepard would choose the latter. This doesn’t even require Shepard to be indoctrinated, merely to be a reasonably non-psychopathic person.

Furthermore, without this motivation, the Control ending makes NO sense for Shepard to choose.

I can sort of see why a non-psychopath Shepard might choose Synthesis, as it’s an option that requires no genocide, at least. But there’s just really no excuse for Shepard ever choosing Control beyond plain old bad storytelling.

From the very beginning of ME3, Shepard believes The Illusive Man to be wrong in his notions about controlling the Reapers. We’re not even given dialogue choices about this, and when we do have choices, even Renegade Shepard only gets to choose HOW to tell TIM “no,” rather than an option to say “sure, sounds like a great plan, sign me up!”

Shepard may have been supportive of Cerberus in ME2, may have told the Virmire Survivor that Cerberus was right, may have turned over the Collector base to Cerberus, but from “Priority: Mars” onward, Shepard is firmly opposed to the idea of controlling the Reapers. They know in their gut that TIM is wrong and destroying the Reapers is the right choice.

But then, after either killing TIM or inducing him to kill himself, Shepard gets a few words from this synthetic that they have no reason to believe, and suddenly it’s just “Whoopsie! I guess TIM was right. How embarrassing, finding that out right after I made him kill himself. Guess I’ll choose Control!”

Furthermore, Shepard knows The Illusive Man was indoctrinated. They can’t trust anything TIM was advocating for, because his will was not his own. Whatever he wanted is almost surely what the Reapers want. Shepard ALSO knows AI are capable of deception, because EDI told them so. So, unless Shepard is, indeed, indoctrinated, absolutely nothing about the Control option can be trusted.

Just as there is a such thing as Plot Armor, I find there is also a such thing as Plot-Convenient Incompetence (ask any Shadowhunters fan if you doubt the existence of this phenomenon), where an otherwise capable capable marksman suddenly can’t hit the broad side of a barn or defend their self from an amateur, or an intelligent character does the dumb thing for no reason other than TPTB say so. Shepard doing a 180 on choosing Control falls within this category. There’s just no valid excuse for it.

Even if Shepard is fully Renegade, the most likely option is that they just don’t care if EDI and the Geth die (assuming they’re still alive by this point) and thus, they have no motive to choose one of the self-sacrificial options. They’ll simply select Destroy.

In fact, the color coding of the options leads us to believe that Destroy IS the Renegade option, and Control is the paragon option (still doesn't make Control a logical solution, however, given everything Shepard has believed up until now.)

I suppose one could make the argument that Shepard wants power, but if Shepard’s existence as they know it is going to end, what good is that power? What would they do with it if they had it, and why were they so opposed to claiming it ten minutes ago when TIM was still yammering madly at them?

Moreover, whether or not they believe the Catalyst about the options they’re presented, a Shepard that has brokered peace between the Geth and Quarians KNOWS the Catalyst is wrong on one major point:

Synthetics and organics do not have to destroy each other. It’s NOT inevitable. Shepard has just finished proving it.

See, there’s this old saying about history and what happens to people who don’t learn from it. It’s entirely possible that the reason synthetics and organics have “inevitably” been destined to destroy each other is because the Reapers have been factory-resetting history every 50,000 years. No cycle has had an opportunity to learn from the mistakes older civilizations who have survived the development of artificial intelligence.

One might argue that Shepard could question if they would be proving the Catalyst’s assertion by selecting Destroy. But they wouldn’t, because regardless of the subsequent fate of EDI and the Geth, Shepard has proven that achieving peace and cooperation between organics and synthetics IS possible. EDI and the Geth, if they are indeed destroyed, will not be destroyed because of an inevitable war between them and organics, but because their destruction was an grievous side effect of eliminating the Reapers, who were bent on annihilating organics.

Furthermore, history will take the lessons of EDI’s willing cooperation with organics and the quarians mistakes and Shepard’s ability to broker peace between the quarians and the Geth forward into the future, and thus the cycle of organics and synthetics destroying each other may be broken.

And if not, well, that’s a problem for future generations to figure out. At least now there will BE future generations.

As for Synthesis, personally, I think it would take an incredible amount of confidence to make that choice for however many TRILLIONS of beings. Given the choice between sacrificing…what? A few million–maybe even a couple billion?...beings (who, unfortunately, are all synthetic) or forcing a metamorphosis no one consented to upon trillions of beings–including those same synthetics–it seems hard to rationalize why Shepard would choose the Synthesis option.

Especially since, again, the Catalyst is advocating for it, and the Catalyst can lie.

Finally, the fact that there are no synthetic races that have carried over from past cycles suggests that the Reapers don’t intend to let the synthetic races of the galaxy survive any more than they do organics. If Shepard choses Control or Synthesis and is wrong, EDI and the Geth will be destroyed anyway.

✴️TL;DR: Conclusion #2

Shepard has no reason to believe anything the Catalyst says, and a great deal of reason to mistrust any options the Catalyst offers them, as those options are likely to be in the Reapers best interest, rather than benefit to the organic (or possibly even synthetic) species of the galaxy. The Catalyst has the ability and motivation to try to discourage Shepard from selecting the Destroy ending, and Shepard has no reason not to know this and be able to draw these conclusions.

PART THREE: What does the Crucible really do, anyway?

Hearkening back to Part One, it’s established by Legion in ME2 that EDI, the Geth, and the Reapers are software. The platforms they operate on offer them mobility and the capacity to fight offensively or simply defend themselves, but their platforms are not what they are.

Therefore, whatever the Crucible does, it’s going to affect them as software, rather than as physical entities.

We’re told the Crucible is a “dark energy device” but given very few specifics.

IDK about y’all, but the word “energy” makes me think of something along the lines of an EMP. However, we’re not warned that it will make ALL software stop functioning, only synthetic beings. Ships, weapons, environment suits, even VIs, we have no indication that all computer-dependent technology is going to be effectively bricked (if we were, we would have to also consider the effect of the Destroy ending upon the vol and quarians, but clearly that isn’t the case.)

Even the Citadel and mass relays, which of any technology in the galaxy are most likely to share significant amounts of code with the Reapers, are merely damaged but capable of being repaired. That is, assuming you took the time to get your war assets high enough for an optimal ending.

Assuming the Catalyst is being honest about anything in this regard, the Crucible is a power source and the Catalyst directs its power toward…something.

(Side note: This calls into question the veracity of the Catalysts’ claims as regards Synthesis. I can see how the Crucible might enable Control–the signal would basically reprogram the Reapers to accept Shepard’s commands rather than the Catalyst’s–but how does energy result in the merging of organic and synthetic beings into a new kind of being? I’m no astrophysicist, but that one requires a significant suspension of disbelief.)

Moving on, however. How then, does the catalyst direct it ONLY toward synthetic beings and not any other kind of technology? Well, it would have to target something EDI and the Geth and the Reapers all have in common: Reaper code.

We may deduce that the “energy” functions more like a signal, or possibly even a virus, because it requires precise targeting. The only way to avoid bricking every bit of technology in the galaxy is for that signal or virus to specifically target Reaper code and Reaper code ONLY.

Additionally, the Citadel is required to create a targeted signal from the energy generated by the Crucible, and the mass relay network is required to boost and disseminate the signal. Which means we have to ask ourselves what does the Citadel and relay network do or possess to make this possible.

The answer: they were built by the Reapers, based on the Reapers own technology. They are able to target Reaper code because they are made using Reaper code.

As we’ve already established in Part One, the integration of Reaper code in both EDI and the Geth is (or should be, if we’re disregarding inconvenient plot holes and applying logical thought to the matter) minimally invasive and the lack of it should not present an impediment to their functionality, aside from downgrading the Geth.

In the Citadel DLC, we see that EDI still functions even when cut off from the Normandy, where the greater part of her hardware exists. If she can still function even without the vast majority of her processing power, it stands to reason that she can function without the small portion of her code that is compatible with or derived from Reaper tech.

Will she function perfectly? Probably not at first. Much like her momentary glitching out if she rides in the car with Shepard to intercept the Normandy in the Citadel DLC, it’s likely she would be taken offline for a while to repair broken circuits and patch now-incomplete logic, which is likely why Normandy ends up crash landing on the unknown jungle planet.

But we’re told more than once that EDI is the ship, and the ship is EDI. The time when they could have functioned without each other has passed; EDI and the Normandy are now fully integrated. So the fact that Normandy is able to be repaired and takes off again suggests that EDI is also eventually restored to functionality, without whatever Reaper technology she may have initially had integrated into her systems.

She may, however, lose her mobile platform, since that body is likely to incorporate MORE Reaper tech than her older code. This would explain why there are no slides of her stepping off the Normandy with Joker in any ending except Synthesis, and why she isn’t physically present in the scene at the memorial wall.

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