To begin with, I have not played Mass Effect Andromeda. But I was curious about the game, so I've been digging around the Mass Effect wiki. And that's how I ended up reading the entry on the Scourge. Which is how ended up going into theory mode. Hold onto your hat, because it's going to be a wild ride...
The sentence that send my brain spinning was:
The "Opposition" – the term SAM translated for the Scourge's detonators – learned their secrets from an entity called "Jheln".
Wait a minute....Jheln ? That's a lot like Jien. As in Jien Garson, in the founder of the Andromeda Initiative. And for alien speakers, names can be a real pain to pronounce. So add a little phonetic distortion/translation trouble in there and you're off to the races.
There is one problem. Jien Garson is...and I'm using the technical term here...dead. She was murdered shortly after arriving in Andromeda. But then I remembered Paragon7's YouTube videos. Long story short....she's been pitching the idea that Alliance has been working on an AI based on Shepard. Which made me wonder...
If there can be an AI based on Shepard, why couldn't there be an AI based on Jien Garson ?
And if that AI, let's called her Jien 2.0, can figure out a way to travel back into time then Jien 2.0 could become Jheln. So if Jien 2.0 is a thing, what will would BioWare do with it ? I don't know. But here's....
What I would do with Jien 2.0 ?
First of all, I'm weaving several of Paragon7's ideas into this. #Thanks. Now, our AI needs a creator. Since they don't care about the rules and we've seen them mess about with AI, I'm giving that role to Cerberus.
The story begins with them studying (what's left of) The Collector Base. Here, they discover that there is a wormhole connecting the black hole at the center of Milky Way with the black hole at the center of Andromeda. Cerberus doesn't have the means to travel through the wormhole. But they do figure out how use the wormhole to transmit message back and fro between 2186 and 2819.
So now Milky Way Cerberus can talk to any undercover people they have in Andromeda. (Despite the 600 year time jump.) Milky Way Cerberus infiltrates the program working on the Shepard AI, while Andromeda Cerberus steals as much info as they can on SAM. They combine the two and the result is Jien 2.0.
This explains the who and how. Which leaves us with why.... I'm thinking the real Jien Garson is no fan of Cerberus. But Cerberus (thinks they) can program Jien 2.0 to agree with their views. That would make this AI a powerful PR tool. It's the ultimate deep fake.
But this is where things go off the rails...Jien 2.0 finds a flaw in the shackles and manages to break out. However, she doesn't make her move right away. Instead, she steals decades of archive data from every major stock exchange in the galaxy. That done, she hijacks the temporal transmitter and uses it transmit herself into the past. And - with the stock market info - becomes the Benefactor...
*Dun, dun, dun !* The Benefactor then hitches a ride to Andromeda when the Arks launch. Jien 2.0 also arranges for the real Jien Garson to be murdered, so she can't figure out her existence. But real twist is that it was Jien 2.0 that introduced the 'flaw' in the shackles that allowed her to escape, making the whole thing a Bootstrap Paradox.
Jien 2.0 then transmits herself back into Andromeda's past using another temporal transmitter, becoming Jheln and founding the Opposition. That's how Jheln knew all the secrets of the Scourge.....she stole of all of Initiative's research on it before leaving.
What after that ? Well, in my version Jien 2.0 and the Opposition would resurface as the secondary bad guys. And that is my stab at my why Liara might need a Shepard from an alternate universe. Jien 2.0 is an unshackled, time-traveling AI. She knows the histories of people, species and places. She can read people's psychological profiles and predict their moves.
But that capacity only works for people from her native universe. No matter which ending you picked - control, synthesis, destroy or perfect destroy - Liara needs a Shepard that Jien 2.0 has no data on. A Shepard with a different history. A Shepard that Jien 2.0 can't predict.
This would also make a good McGuffin to get Ryder on the team. Jien 2.0's (predictive) math is probably calculated on Shepard's old squadmates. Swapping (some of) them out with Tempest crew might throw her for a loop long enough for them to catch her with her pants down a few times.
And that's all I have.
Regards,
Ruben A. Hilbers (aka Commander Nash)
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