The hum of the Citadel never ceased. It was a constant, frictionless blend of species, languages, and subtle power plays cloaked beneath polite urban ritual. Standing in the shadow of a service-level transit hub, Sebastian watched a maintenance bot roll past, its diagnostic tone chiming softly. No one else noticed it. That was the point.
SAS-C pinged softly in his inner ear.
"Local surveillance nodes cleared. We are unmonitored for the next twenty-three seconds."
Sebastian nodded once. "Good. Upload the vendor anomaly feed."
A translucent cascade of data populated the left corner of his vision—commodity trade shifts, inventory discrepancies, unfiled tax movements. But what Sebastian focused on was smaller. Quieter. A stall that had consistently misreported omni-gel calibration times. Another that subtly overcharged turians while offering discounts to asari, but only when krogan were in proximity.
None of these mattered, individually. But collectively? They suggested a rot that, if nudged, would shift. And that shift—if timed right—would cause someone else to move. That person might become a better officer, or avoid a bar fight, or meet the right recruiter.
> Not events. Consequences.
He selected three vendor nodes. SAS-C confirmed overlapping behavioral prediction clusters. The outcomes weren't guaranteed—but they were close enough to steer.
"Option Beta. Minimal push."
"Understood. Deploying irritant subroutine: transaction friction at point-of-sale. Delays between 3.2 and 7.8 seconds expected."
That was all it would take. A customer becomes annoyed, posts a review. C-Sec sees the pattern, flags the vendor. Within a week, a compliance check leads to a revoked license. The new vendor who fills the stall is an elcor with spotless records—and a nephew with dreams of military service.
> All of that for seven seconds of lag.
He took a slow breath, not because he was tired, but to keep the rhythm steady. His body was changing still—nanites reinforcing musculature, mapping his nervous system for improved biotic integration. But the mental work had always come easier.
He moved to a second target, this time on the Presidium. A bartender at a popular human-asari lounge. Known for loose lips and a fondness for cash bribes.
"SAS-C, still monitoring that officer candidate with redacted father?"
"Yes. Her route intersects with the bar in 15 minutes."
"Send a priority reservation notice to the bartender. Make it look like a diplomatic request from an asari consort. Take him off shift early."
"Noted. Executing."
Sebastian didn't smile. But he felt the alignment click into place.
That officer candidate didn't need to hear what the bartender was about to say. She didn't need the seeds of corruption or scandal wrapped in her legacy. All she needed was a clean night and a clear path. If she joined C-Sec with her mind intact, she would eventually vouch for a salarian engineer wrongly accused of sabotage. That engineer, exonerated, would later join a black ops team that would one day pull Shepard out of a failed training op.
He didn't know the details of every future. But he could feel when something mattered.
And this mattered.
> None of them would know. That was the beauty of it.
He stepped out into the pedestrian flow, blending back into the crowd. He had no name, no history, no records still active in Citadel systems. But the nanites made sure his blood type, biometric pulses, even the reflectivity of his skin matched a dozen different anonymous profiles—each designed to pass under different scanners.
SAS-C's voice shifted tone—less operational, more reflective.
"You've begun. Actualization event density is rising. Would you like me to calculate risk of exposure?"
"No," Sebastian said quietly. "Not yet. Exposure isn't what we're avoiding. Attention is."
He paused near a stairwell. Watched a quarrel between a volus and a hanar de-escalate without intervention. Just two beings with nothing in common managing to part peacefully.
Not every ripple came from him.
But more and more of them responded to his frequency.
"Let's move. Next route."
"Affirmative. Eastern ring maintenance access: unguarded for 2.4 minutes. I recommend proceeding."
And just like that, he was in motion again—feet quiet, eyes scanning, mind already calculating the next move.
The residence hub was quiet this late into cycle. Fluorescent lights cast long, artificial shadows over the corridor walls. Sebastian sat cross-legged in the corner of his unit, facing a blank wall that now doubled as a projection canvas. SAS-C floated a constellation of data clusters across the surface.
"We've logged forty-seven karmic interventions since system calibration," SAS-C began. "Thirty-one succeeded by targeted metrics. Seven showed neutral drift. Nine—unfavorable rebounds."
Sebastian raised an eyebrow. "Nine? That's higher than I expected."
"Six of the nine were low-severity: interpersonal conflicts, minor medical delays. One resulted in a loss of employment. One in escalated violence. One—still undetermined."
That last one mattered. He stood, walked slowly toward the display.
"Which?"
A frame expanded. A still image. A human male mid-motion—blurry security footage from Zakera Ward. The timestamp was from two nights ago.
"We delayed a gang recruiter using financial friction. Your model assumed the targeted at-risk youth would miss their meeting and choose to attend a vocational seminar instead."
"And?" Sebastian asked.
"The recruiter missed the meeting, as predicted. But the youth was intercepted by a separate gang affiliate—one we didn't anticipate. He joined them instead. Incidentally, this group is far more violent."
Sebastian exhaled slowly. Not in anger. In recalibration.
"He became a worse version of what we were trying to prevent."
"Affirmative. Local outcome worsened. However, long-term impacts remain indeterminate."
Of course they did. That was the problem with karma—it wasn't linear. It folded and refolded itself across time. You saved one life and damned three others—or you broke one and healed ten more.
This was not about justice. This was about balance.
He turned his back to the wall and sat again.
"I need better bias buffers in the predictive layer. Human emotional volatility is creating too much divergence."
"Already adjusting model weights. Do you wish to restrict further nudges until model confidence rises?"
"No," he said firmly. "But only target opportunities with positive resonance gradients over eighty percent. At least until I understand the behavioral deltas."
"Understood."
He laced his fingers together, thinking.
There had been a time—back on Franklin's World, before everything burned—when he still believed in the clean line between good and evil. In medicine, things lived or died. In war, people were saved or lost. But this wasn't medicine. This wasn't war. This was… sediment.
He was trying to repair a structure whose architect had vanished, whose blueprints had been shredded, and whose materials were slowly turning to dust.
You couldn't fix that with heroism. You fixed it with patience. Calibration. Correction.
He rose again, slowly this time. The enhanced musculature made his joints feel… too efficient. There was a subtle hum beneath his skin now. The nanites weren't just adjusting him physically. They were tuning him, aligning him with the job he'd been given.
He wasn't sure he liked that. But it was necessary.
"SAS-C, begin simulation for ripple integration over ninety days. Use adjusted bias logic, remove Shepard-linked events for now."
"Confirmed. Commander Shepard's future influence will be modeled as an independent attractor, not a dependent variable."
He nodded. That was important. Shepard was still young, still growing into her frequency. She had to come into her own without interference. Only when she was stable could her resonance be harnessed.
His job was to clear the static around her future—not to guide her toward it.
Another ping.
"One last anomaly. Vendor incident from two days ago—your sabotage of their point-of-sale systems. Local C-Sec agent assigned to investigate was reassigned last-minute. A different officer filled in: recently transferred, low corruption index, strong ethical markers. He arrested the vendor. Your predicted outcome was fulfilled."
"So it worked?"
"No. The arrest went poorly. The vendor resisted. Injuries occurred. A bystander—low-income quarian vendor—was caught in the scuffle. Hospitalized. Her stall is now closed. Family destabilized."
A long pause.
Sebastian looked down at his hands. Still calloused from his training. Still too clean.
"Model that outcome as a negative resonance bleed. Begin a stabilizer subroutine. Find a node in her life path that can be elevated—her child, perhaps."
"Running options now."
He leaned against the wall.
He couldn't feel guilty. That wasn't useful. But he could feel aware. And that was enough.
--
The Shadow Broker did not breathe, but his proxies did.
Through one such proxy—a rotund volus analyst named Kyren—the report had been delivered two hours ago. It was neatly filed under minor statistical aberrations. Entropy clusters, as the analysts called them. Random sequences that failed to fit expected outcome curves, despite all input factors remaining within predictive margins.
Normally, they'd be flagged and forgotten. Randomness was built into all models. And the Citadel, with its dozens of cultures, religions, and motives, was never fully predictable. No system could be.
But this pattern… it reoccurred.
Kyren hadn't recognized the danger. He simply thought it curious. A rogue spreadsheet. A glitch in statistical translation.
The Shadow Broker had not dismissed it.
He now stood—through his surrogate node—beneath the dim illumination of his ship's internal war room, three orbital sectors away from the Citadel itself. The wall before him flickered, projecting motion paths, economic streams, loyalty fluctuations. Thousands of dots moved, paused, aligned. They always did.
But here, near Zakera Ward, in the underlayers where vendor politics and local debt systems met, a void had formed. Not a black hole. Not a catastrophic rupture. A silence. Events had unfolded—but without the preamble his analysts would usually catch. Without the setup.
One vendor fell. Another took its place. A patrol moved earlier than scheduled. A candidate entered C-Sec with fewer political red marks than expected.
Individually meaningless.
Collectively… patterned.
The Broker didn't need emotion to recognize threat. His methods were logical, recursive, perfected through dozens of information wars. You didn't watch every piece—you watched the tension between pieces.
And this new pattern had no tension.
Just results.
He queried the AI core embedded within his primary terminal. "List entities flagged as chaotic agents operating on Zakera Ward in the past ten days."
The list was short: a few mercenaries, two data brokers working out of hidden backlines, and a suspected STG fragment team.
None of them matched.
"Overlay with observed karmic entropy zones."
The AI hesitated. Then responded.
"No overlap. Observed outcomes have no attributed source."
"Impossible," the Broker murmured aloud, a habit he rarely indulged in.
He tapped a point on the interface. It rippled, expanding. A security feed replayed: a bar fight broken up before it began. A protest that didn't escalate. A vendor cart collision that should have happened—but didn't.
Everywhere he looked, someone had already made the adjustment.
But no trace of action remained. No purchases, no forged comms, no hacked systems. Just outcomes. As if intent itself had bent around reality without leaving footprints.
"No pattern means no mind. And yet..." the Broker whispered, "...this feels like design."
He stood back. Folded his arms.
There was only one other period where his models had shown entropy clusters like this. It had been decades ago—long before even the relay collapses or the Thessian blackout wave. A time when entire diplomatic frameworks shifted slightly off track. Subtle, silent—then gone.
No actor was ever identified. No gains traced. Just a period of dissonance that defied analysis.
This… felt like that.
The Broker sent a private flag to his trusted inner circle: Investigate Citadel low-tier behavior anomalies. Classify as potential infiltration by non-state actor. Use non-invasive protocols. Observe only.
He would not act prematurely. That was how pawns got sacrificed.
But he would watch.
And if whatever this ghost was made another move, the Broker would see the ripple this time.
--
The room was dark save for the pale blue strip of ambient light running along the ceiling. Sebastian lay still, not asleep, but quiet—his body unmoving on the synthetic mattress of his Citadel lodging, his mind focused inward.
SAS-C spoke with deliberate softness.
"Your physiological vitals have stabilized. Biotic lattice density now at threshold. Would you like to begin emotional harmonization protocols?"
He didn't answer right away. The words emotional harmonization sounded like something a meditation app would offer. But the truth was simpler: the nanites had begun to shift him biochemically, making it possible to feel resonance more directly.
"Do it," he said.
The moment he spoke, he felt it—pressure, like a sound he couldn't hear but could feel in his teeth. It wasn't painful, but it insisted. Like gravity that didn't pull downward, but inward. Toward something.
A resonance pulse.
Faint, almost imperceptible, but present. The room around him hadn't changed. But his context had.
"Source?" he asked.
"Triangulating. Signal is ambient—nonhostile, low-frequency harmonic echo. Traced to extended temporal contact. Asari individual: anomalous biotic field signature present in shared mission history."
He sat up slowly.
"You mean the huntress?"
"Correct. Proximity not required. Resonance appears action-aligned, not location-dependent."
He stood, letting the dim room fall away as he focused on what he felt.
This wasn't attraction. It wasn't longing. It wasn't even curiosity.
It was compatibility—of purpose, of function. Like two tuning forks made from different elements ringing in harmony across a vacuum.
"She's moved," he said.
"Yes. Relocated to C-Sec training facility orbiting the Rings of Tangir. Assignment: combat readiness auditing for cross-species integration teams."
Not nearby. Not even on the station. But aligned.
It made sense. He had felt her frequency before—during the test run where they'd jointly assessed a nanite-based armor trial. She'd been terse, disciplined, hard to read. But beneath that, something had hummed. Not romantically. Not yet. Just… recognition.
"I want to begin syncing deeper harmonics. Not with her—yet. Just… prepare me."
"Acknowledged. Building neurofeedback scaffold. You may experience temporary emotional volatility as the system calibrates to subjective values and intuitive response patterns."
He exhaled slowly and began his routine.
Pushups. Then planks. Then combat form drills—slow motion, perfectly controlled.
It wasn't about training anymore. The nanites ensured his body learned faster than his mind could track. This was about tuning himself—finding the rhythm where action, thought, and intention aligned.
Each move clicked against the last.
At minute twelve, the feedback began. Not pain. Contrast.
He felt something tighten behind his eyes. An emotion surfaced—but not from memory.
A flash of a child crying in a war zone. Not his child. Not even a memory. Just… a truth.
Then another: a brief, silent handshake between two officers. One of them destined to die saving the other. That future wasn't set yet, but it was resonant.
SAS-C clarified.
"You are now perceiving karmic anchors. The tuning process is bringing surface-layer harmonics into view. You are feeling… what the universe cannot remember."
Sebastian stopped moving.
"You mean… ghosts?"
"No. These are not the dead. These are the unresolved. The half-burned blueprints of a broken narrative."
He sat on the floor, eyes closed. Letting it wash over him.
This was why he was here. Not to overpower. Not to lead armies. But to tune the galaxy back toward coherence.
And the way to do that… was by harmonizing the players. One by one. Or in rare cases—together.
He opened his eyes and stood.
"Scan for the girl—the quarian vendor's daughter. The one displaced during the vendor arrest."
"Located. Currently in vocational training queue for hydroponics technician certification. Projected dropout in four days due to financial destabilization."
"Send her mother a commission. Anonymous repair contract. One that pays enough to finish the training."
"Done."
"And while you're at it," he added, "cross-reference all recent vocational dropouts against karmic acceleration vectors. Let's catch the ones that matter before they vanish."
"Running predictive models now."
He stood in silence. Let the room settle.
Each nudge was a note.
Each intervention, a chord.
And slowly, a song was forming.