Chapter 1: Awakening in Hell
POV: Marc Wayne
Darkness. Then—
The first sensation was wrong. Everything was wrong. Marc's consciousness slammed back into a body that didn't fit, muscles too lean, scars he'd never earned etched across skin that felt foreign against the cold metal table. His throat burned with screams he couldn't remember making.
"—fascinating adaptation rate. Look at these neural patterns."
The voice cut through his confusion like surgical steel. Marc's eyes snapped open to sterile white light and found himself staring up at two figures in medical scrubs. The woman, dark-skinned with predatory eyes, gestured at a holographic display while her companion—pale, nervous, obviously junior—monitored readings from machines Marc didn't recognize.
"This isn't possible. This is a video game. This is—"
[IDA SYSTEM v2.7 INITIALIZING...]
[SCANNING HOST BIOMETRICS...]
[CRITICAL ERROR: CONSCIOUSNESS MISMATCH DETECTED]
[EMERGENCY BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATED]
[TUTORIAL COMMENCING. CURRENT SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 12%]
Marc's vision filled with translucent text and data streams that shouldn't exist. His breath caught. The machines around him—the angular design, the blue-white holographic displays, the distinctive Cerberus logo stenciled on every surface—he knew them. From hundreds of hours playing Mass Effect on his laptop in his cramped Seattle apartment where he'd been debugging network protocols just—
When? Yesterday? A lifetime ago?
"Dr. Nayar, his neural activity just spiked," the younger man said, voice cracking. "These readings don't match baseline human parameters."
Dr. Nayar leaned closer, her breath smelling of sterile antiseptic and something that might have been coffee. "Marcus Wayne, test subject designation C-47. You've been unconscious for seventy-two hours following genetic modification procedures. Can you tell me what you remember?"
Marcus Wayne? That wasn't his name. His name was Marc—Marc Anderson from Seattle, Washington, software developer at a mid-tier tech company who'd died in a car accident on his way to work, hydroplaning on black ice and—
The memories crashed together like tectonic plates. Two lives, two identities, Marc Anderson the developer and Marcus Wayne the test subject, bleeding into each other until he couldn't tell which pain belonged to whom.
"I—" he tried to speak, his voice a rasp. "Where—?"
"Omega Station, Terminus Systems," Dr. Nayar said, making notes on a datapad. "You volunteered for our experimental IDA protocol. Though your psychological profile suggests you may not remember the process clearly."
Omega. Mass Effect. The IDA System humming in his mind wasn't a hallucination. This was real. This was horrifyingly, impossibly real.
In the adjacent cell, something that looked like a cross between a lizard and a rabid dog lay dying. Vorcha. Marc's game knowledge supplied the name even as his human instincts recoiled. The creature's chest rose and fell in uneven gasps, its regenerative abilities finally overwhelmed by whatever they'd done to it.
[GENE MATERIAL DETECTED]
[SCANNING... ANALYZING...]
[VORCHA REGENERATION I (COMMON) ACQUIRED]
[FIRST GENE SLOT UNLOCKED (1/1)]
[AUTO-EQUIP INITIATED FOR SURVIVAL PURPOSES]
[WARNING: USER HP CRITICAL - IMMEDIATE HEALING COMMENCING]
Heat flooded Marc's body. The cuts on his arms—when had they appeared?—began knitting together with visible speed. Dr. Nayar's eyes widened.
"Cole, are you seeing this?" Her voice held the tone of someone witnessing a breakthrough. "The integration rate is unprecedented. Subject is spontaneously healing at approximately five percent biological efficiency."
Dr. Cole stammered something about impossible metabolic rates, but Marc wasn't listening. He was staring at the Vorcha's now-still form and understanding with crystalline horror what had just happened. The System had absorbed genetic material from a dying alien. He was no longer entirely human.
"This is a death game," he thought, hysteria creeping up his throat. "I'm in a death game with RPG mechanics, and these people are NPCs who think I'm an experiment."
Dr. Nayar reached for something that looked suspiciously like a surgical laser. "We need to see how deep the integration goes. The neural mapping alone could revolutionize—"
Terror overrode confusion. Marc rolled off the table, his newly enhanced muscles responding faster than his panicked mind could process. The restraints that should have held him snapped like rubber bands—when had he become this strong?
"Containment breach!" Dr. Cole shouted, backing toward what Marc recognized as an alarm panel.
Marc grabbed the nearest object—a datapad—and hurled it at the doctor's head with accuracy that surprised him. Cole crumpled. Dr. Nayar reached for a sidearm, but Marc was already moving, muscle memory from a life he'd never lived guiding him toward the exit.
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: HOSTILE ENTITIES DETECTED]
[BASIC COMBAT HUD ACTIVE]
[SURVIVAL RECOMMENDATION: FLEE]
Red text overlaid his vision like a video game interface, highlighting exits and marking threats. It was surreal and terrifying and exactly what he needed. Alarms blared as he stumbled through corridors that reeked of industrial cleaner and desperation.
The layout was wrong—too cramped, too improvised. This wasn't the clean Cerberus facility from the games. This was a black site, a place where they brought people to disappear.
[DIRECTIONAL ASSISTANCE ACTIVATED]
[EXIT LOCATED: 47 METERS, BEARING 023°]
[USER COORDINATION RATING: POOR]
[SUPPLEMENTAL NOTE: LEFT MEANS THE DIRECTION YOUR HEART IS NOT ON]
Even in mortal terror, Marc almost laughed. The System had an attitude.
He crashed through a door marked with alien script his brain somehow translated as "Authorized Personnel Only" and found himself in a maintenance corridor. Behind him, security forces shouted in multiple languages—human English, the clicking Turian dialect, and something that might have been Salarian rapid-fire.
The corridor opened onto a balcony overlooking Omega's lower wards. The view hit him like a physical blow: kilometer-high spires of scrap metal and jury-rigged electronics, neon signs advertising services in a dozen alien languages, and crowds of beings that shouldn't exist walking the streets below like it was perfectly normal.
Turians with their distinctive facial plates. Blue-skinned Asari. The hulking forms of Krogan. All of them real, all of them here, all of them part of a universe he'd only experienced through a screen.
Marc's legs gave out. He collapsed against the balcony railing, watching his wounds continue to close while the aliens below went about their business.
[WELCOME TO OMEGA]
[LOCAL SURVIVAL RATE FOR HUMANS: 34%]
[USER'S CURRENT SURVIVAL RATE: CALCULATING...]
[ANALYSIS COMPLETE: 12% AND DECLINING]
[RECOMMENDATION: ACQUIRE SHELTER AND SUSTENANCE WITHIN 6 HOURS OR FACE STATISTICAL DEATH]
The laughter that erupted from his throat sounded dangerously close to sobbing. He'd gone from debugging network code in Seattle to hiding from alien security forces on a criminal space station in what felt like minutes.
The absurdity of it overwhelmed him. He laughed until his sides ached, until tears ran down his face, until the sound attracted the attention of passersby below who looked up at the hysterical human with the mixture of disgust and indifference he'd come to associate with Omega in the games.
When the laughter finally subsided, Marc found himself staring at his hands. Human hands, but stronger now, healing faster. The Vorcha gene was working, keeping him alive.
"Adaptation is survival," he whispered, remembering the System's words. He'd adapted to survive an impossible transmigration. Now he had to adapt to survive Omega.
The artificial stars above Omega's dome flickered like dying embers. Marc pulled himself upright and began the long descent to the lower wards, every step taking him deeper into a world where the wrong move meant death, and where the only thing keeping him alive was alien DNA he'd stolen from a dying test subject.
Behind him, searchlights swept the balcony where he'd been. Ahead lay the sprawling criminal underworld of the galaxy's most dangerous station.
Marc walked into it with nothing but a stolen gene and a sarcastic AI in his head. The System's assessment of his survival chances dropped another percentage point.
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